Proteus

Stephen's thought covers a lot of ground in this episode. Fleeting memories of the events of the last two chapters mix with images that we haven't seen before. This makes this episode difficult to critique effectively without getting as fragmented as the prose is.

I think Amelia gets pretty close to a major theme in Proteus. Stephen IS grappling with appearances and things in themselves. But I think it gets even broader than that. Stephen is trying to reconcile his thoughts with the physical world. The episode begins with a solipsist argument. Stephen contemplates the legitimacy of the world as he experiences it through his senses. These two things, mind and world, seem to act independently of each other and yet perpetually interweave. This paradox is the allegorical shape-shifting Proteus. In order for Stephen to mature as a writer, he has to resolve this mind-world duality even as it rapidly dilates and switches forms.

And this problem takes on many forms. Joyce explicates Stephen's train of thought in a way that makes the world and consciousness interrupt each other. Stephen's imagination pokes out into the real world: "dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal." Mr. Deasy's determinism impresses itself onto the unsightly scene that presents itself to Stephen, surfacing amid simple sense-images to interpret the world. But he thought of Deasy because he thought of death. He thought of death because the living dog scared him and reminded him of his cowardice. This thought reminds him of a drowning man, who Stehen knows he would not have the courage to save. And that thought makes him wonder at his refusal to pray for his dead mother. Stephen seems to be just as unable to make sense of these twists and turns as we are.

There seems to be some kind of a resolution towards the end, because Stephen writes something. As he writes he thinks: "I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back." Maybe he is trying to bring his mind and body closer together, by pushing and pulling at the latter with his thoughts. The speed at which thought bounces off memory and physicality seems to increase as Stephen becomes inspired. By the end, the trains of thought slow down and clear sections of sensation and introspection emerge. This is a real hard chapter. Hopefully I'll be able to make something more out of it when we talk in class.

Nestor

This episode opens with a reflection on memory; sparked by Cochrane's forgetfulness: "The boy's blank face asked the blank window." Stephen is struggling with his past and as he half-heartedly teaches history to the class, that struggle extends to all that has past. He plays at an interpretation of Blake that would vindicate him: one day all existence becomes infinitely condensed and history will become inconsequential. This hope plays a big role in Stephens pity for the forgetful students in his class like Cochrane, Armstrong, and Sargent. He sees a validity in the blankness of their minds.

Stephen's thought on historical philosophy is resistant to Deasy's fatalism. But he can't manage to shake determinism all together. When he asks in thought: "Or was that only possible which came to pass?" he mockingly replies to himself, "weave, weaver of the wind." This is an allusion to prophecy through the mode of an allusion to Irishness. The wind, he thinks, might be guided but to us it is unknowable.

This doesn't stop Stephen from confidently contradicting Deasy: "The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I will." At least part of Stephen is disdainfully indifferent
to Deasy along with theological determinism and a money-driven outlook on life. When Deasy motions for order, Stephen replies with chaos. To his history? "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." God's plan? "God is a shout in in the street." The world seems to bend in Stephen's favor in these arguments. When Deasy insists: "All history moves towards one great goal," a goal is scored in the students' hockey game outside. This undermines Deasy's argument with a meaningless random coincidence that ties itself to his stubborn point. But a different reading suggests that Stephen's destiny is calling him, and that God gives signs.

These contradictions play out towards the end of the chapter when Stephen's indifference to Deasy softens. He agrees that he "was not born to be a teacher". And Stephen agrees to help Deasy publish his paper, not only because Deasy is Stephen's boss, but because of a self-conscious decision on Stephen's part: "Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bollockbefriending bard." Stephen seems to be giving up his struggle against fate.

Deasy makes an interesting Nestor. Homer's Nestor often gave advice to unwilling listeners in the form of tiresome anecdotes about his own achievements as a warrior. Deasy has similar traits, but his claims to greatness have to do with financial wisdom and elderly experience, both of which Stephen rejects. Ironically, he is both a lover of money and an avid anti-semite. His age and experience testifies only to his stubborn and narrow interpretation of history. What Deasy himself believes is a wealth of wisdom and knowledge is actually flawed and inaccurate. Stephen often has to correct him.

Telemachus

This is about the third time I've read this chapter and it is the reading I've gotten the most pleasure out of so far. Yeats and Elliot were good preludes to this book because they sharpened my sensitivity to excellent wordplay. Ulysses, of course, is a masterpiece on phonetic merits alone. You can't get through more than a few sentences before hitting brilliant strings of syllables like "sullen oval jowl", "smokeblue mobile eyes", and "bowl of bitter waters". Joyce was a prose-poet in the highest sense of the word and much of this chapter benefits from being read out-loud.

It's surprising how much of Joyce's humor still retains its force today. Though much of the puns are rooted in elitist intellectual archetypes, many of them are still appreciable. The annotations point to the mockery of the Catholic mass a number of notes, but this time I saw the parody in fluidity for the first time. It reminded me that the first time I read this chapter I actually believed that Buck Mulligan was a monk and that Daedalus was somehow back in training for priesthood. I saw the parody for what it was immediately during this reading. The razor lays "crossed" on the bowl, signaling Christian symbolism. As Mulligan stands with his dressing gown open and floating in the breeze he carries out a blasphemous rendition of the mass. And it's pretty funny. When I read the sensual description of the milk lady pouring the milk ("not hers"), I laughed out loud and read it to my roommate who laughed as well. Another classic is Buck's announcement at the table after taking off his clothes: "Mulligan has been stripped of his garments."

In this chapter, Joyce's style is familiar and reminiscent to Portrait of the Artist. He toils obsessively over the mundane. The forgotten shaving bowl, the ballad of "Joking Jesus",
the Latin quarter hat. These details don't just make the narrative remarkably lucid and real. They also provide a startling contrast against Joyce's bursts of ecstatic writing. They're toned down here. Mulligan and Daedalus suddenly look at each other in a solemn silence. A seal pokes his head out of the bay. Nightmare images of Daedalus' undead motherblow through his mind. If these passages were more prominently featured in Joyce's writing they would seem self-important and lofty. They would lose their firm connection to the real and perceivable. This technique allows Joyce to both startle his reader with jolts of profundity and secure those jolts compellingly to everyday life.

Yeats' later poems

"The Circus Animals' Desertion" left a deep impression on me, both in light of Yeats' struggle with poetic meaning (as outlined in Blackmur's essay) and personally as writer who seeks the inexpressible.

Yeats begins by poking fun - in a somewhat sorrowful way - at his earlier work. This self-criticism emerges out of a frustration with writing. "My circus animals were all on show." Yeats sees a triviality in his youthful poetry. A flamboyant circus is a far cry from what Yeats clearly wants to embody in his work. The profundity he seeks is shadowed by empty entertainment. The performance is shallow, yet personal in a humiliating way. "What can I do but enumerate old themes?" he cries. His audience demands what they are familiar with. He is chained to the mundane

Yeats is unclear about whether it is the essence of his older poems that has become trivial or whether it is their popular interpretation. He seems to strongly disassociate the latter with his ambitions as well as his passions. In the second stanza he seems to condemn one of his themes to uselessness: "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose." While this line technically lists the richness of irony in Oisin's story, the repetition of "vain" implies a deeper disillusionment in the heart of the author. "I starved for the bosom of his faery bride." Yeats could be illuminating the deeper profundity that he is looking for, but the line emphasizes his position on the periphery; as well as the shallow lustfulness of his obsessions.

One of the most powerful lines in this poem echoes this ambiguity. "Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of." All at once Yeats wants his art to stand on its own in its richness but still sees futility in that ambition. Without meaning, these symbols take on an air of superficiality: they are fake sets, actors. In his age, Yeats sees his aesthetic crumbling without the support of firm meaning. The images literally become trash on the street. But Yeats clings to this refuse when he resolves to return to the core of his soul for inspiration. The ladders start in "The foul rag and bone shop of the heart." The profundity exists in the trivial, and the poet must found his ambitions in the peripheral and the mundane.

The Tower

The Tower is a drastic change from Wild Swans in terms of style and content. Yeats has two new sources for inspiration in these poems: the automatic writing of his wife and the system of symbolic philosophy he had composed from the former. The somber reflection of Wild Swans gives way here to a new confidence and, though not a pure one, optimism.

The ambiguity of Yeats' symbols is still there. But before it seemed to reflect Yeats' own insecurity and indecision - or the complexity of the idea. Now the ambiguity in his symbols seems to spring from pure obscurity. Their meaning maybe somewhat intangible, but Yeats uses these symbols as if they are a precise language.

In "The Tower", Yeats holds a confrontation between the moon and the sun. In one part, the two are perilously confused and disaster ensues. The "brightness of the moon", is mistaken for the "prosaic sun". Yeats is referencing his moon phasology. The full moon, implied by the brightness, is the phase of subjectivity. It's hard to tell what this means, but it looks like Yeats is making a pragmatic warning: do not confuse your whims with your imperatives. These men, as "Music drove their wits away", saw their subjective passions as clarity. Thus, they drown.

In the next stanza the speaker cries "O may the moon and sunlight seem/One inextricable beam". The speaker seems to be refering to his own hopes for vindication. He may also, simultaneously, be praying that his creativity be married to the realness of life. These prayers look like they are related to Yeats' own thoughts. As Ellman says, he was aware that his symbology was eccentric. Maybe he is hoping that it will be taken seriously anyway and pondered over, thus the line "For if I triumph I must make men mad".

I'm going to stop here and flesh out this post tomorrow.

On "The Wild Swans at Coole"

The Wild Swans at Coole was published in 1919 - in the aftermath of World War I. Yeats was fifty-four years old. His obsessions with old age and passing time reached new intensities in this book as they became more and more relevant to his immediate experience.

The title poem is the most direct; it sets the sad reflective tone for the rest of the book. The poem takes place on the brink of winter. "The woodland paths are dry" and the seasons, though cyclical, reflect the speakers concern with change. "All's changed", he says, since 19 "autumns" ago. Yeats seems to be specifically referencing the world war, although the change that frightens and saddens him runs deeper than international politics.
The beating wings of the swans "above my head/Trod with a lighter tread" twenty years before. While Yeats is said to have been concerned with aging and death since he was twenty-one, his earlier work is not particularly concerned with personal nostalgia. This book deals directly with the mass mourning of fading memory and Yeats establishes this theme right at the beginning. Even the youthful unchanging swans whose "passion and conquest.../Attend upon them still", will inevitably fly away. The speaker wonders where his most fixed memories will land when they leave him. Yeats leaves it unclear whether this is a rhetorical question reminding us of death's emptiness or an honest hope for greater permanence. The latter seems more likely given Yeats' typical mysticism and the fact that the swans do not die but merely depart - presumably for another lake. But the sinking post-war feeling that absurd nightmares are possible might also reside in the heart of this dark inquiry.

"In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" continues in the same vein; combining the metaphysical thoughts on death concocted by the younger Yeats with the newer and more imminent experiences of nostalgia and fragility. The speaker, in giving a eulogy for a young soldier, is overcome with the sensation that his lifelong friends are dying off. "All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead." He fumbles for optimism in the depths of this experience. New friends and old friends will not squabble over nonsense and he would be spared the pain of watching them meet only to become enemies.
But these conflicts between his close companions seems to be what he misses the most about them. In recounting their various countenances, he emphasizes the bitter differences they might have had had they met. One is an introverted rationalist another a worldly empiricist. The third dead friend shirked both of their philosophies for physical prowess only to lose his might in his later years.
The speaker solemnly recalls these characters (who were real people according to Wikipedia) to differentiate them from the untimely death ("What made us dream that he could comb grey hair") of Robert Gregory. According to Wikipedia he was an "accomplished artist" and Yeats bemoans this loss of talent: "We dreamed that a great painter had been born" whose work "Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might." A mini-refrain emerges in three stanzas endowing Gregory with "renaissance man" characteristics: "Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,/And all he did done perfectly/As though he had but that one trade alone."
In the third of these stanzas, the speaker unifies his nostalgia for his older dead friends with his eulogy for Gregory. He contrasts the great men he knew who "burn damp faggots" - and thus die slower - with those like Gregory who "...may consume/The entire combustible world in one small room.../Because the work had finished in the flare." He tries to console himself and Gregory's mourners with the thought that his great achievements justified his early death. But as he means to begin listing them in greater detail, he is choked by sadness. The very thought of his death "took all my heart for speech."

Yeats breaks the theme of old age and death for a moment in "Solomon to Sheba" and returns to his earlier thoughts on the frustration and futility of love. The poem describes love as cognitively claustrophobic: "There's not a thing but love can make/The world a narrow pound." King Solomon in one of his biblical songs, addresses a lover that is often presumed to be the Queen of Sheba with whom Solomon exchanged praise and gifts (again, this is from Wikipedia). The lover in the song rejects Solomon's persistent love in effective analogy with Yeats' relationship to Maud Gonne. The image of the horse circling a narrow pound depicts love as a tantalizing passion inescapable to all who participate in it, even if they are educated or wise: "There's not a man or woman/Born under the skies/Dare match in learning with us two." But the equality implied by "us two" and "we have found" suggests that Yeats may be thinking of other loves of more mutual nature than the one between him and Maud Gonne. Perhaps Yeat is examining his own nuanced obstinacy in his pursuit of Maud Gonne when he compares it Solomon's love. Or maybe he is unaware of it and merely presumes that all love, no matter how mutual is plagued by the same paradoxes.

In "Lines Written in Dejection", Yeats attaches his concerns with age more firmly to Ireland. The imaginative and mythical elements in the speakers life have disappeared now that he is fifty years old. These mythic images contain, along with Greek references, strong Celtic symbols. "The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies" mention the Celtic color green and resemble pagan dance rituals. The moon is mentioned twice, an important Celtic symbol of motherhood - the second time the moon is called "mother moon". The "wild witches", which are celebrated as "noble ladies", refer to the labeling of practicing Celtic women as witches. In the European witch trials, women would be accused of witch craft based on their resemblance to pagan women and their ritual behavior. The "holy centaurs of the hills" mix Greek mythology with the beautiful Irish landscape.
This fundamental pre-Catholic Irishness bonds with the curious and creative youth that the speaker remembers in himself. In stark contrast to the adventurous and elusive moon, the sun is "embittered" and - strangely - "timid". The timidity of course does not refer to the sun's power, but to its consistency. The sun is too shy to adopt the mystery of the moon and is irrevocably tied to the mundane.