After a detailed rereading of V.Nabokov’s lecture on James Joyce, while enjoying a new translation of Ulysses in Brazilian Portuguese (2012) by Caetano W. Galindo, I let the epic “cotidian” slowly overwhelm me (this is why I was pondering in the VN-L about C. Kinbote’s last words on his future metamorphoses). It was when I came across Edmund Wilson’s inspiring review ( seeing in it the “homeless symbolism of a Catholic who has renounced the faith”) and decided to add a quick survey about his and Nabokov’s commentaries to share with you with links to the complete texts as they were published online. JM
Edmund Wilson on J.Joyce’s Ulysses:
“And as a result of this enormous scale and this microscopic fidelity the chief characters in Ulysses take on heroic proportions. Each one is a room, a house, a city in which the reader can move around. The inside of each one of them is a novel in itself. You stand within a world infinitely populated with the swarming life of experience. Stephen Dedalus, in his scornful pride, rears his brow as a sort of Lucifer; poor Bloom, with his generous impulses and his attempts to understand and master life, is the epic symbol of reasoning man, humiliated and ridiculous, yet extricating himself by cunning from the spirits which seek to destroy him; and Mrs. Bloom, with her terrific force of mingled amorous and maternal affection, with her roots in the dirt of the earth and her joyous flowering in beauty, is the gigantic image of the earth itself from which both Dedalus and Bloom have sprung and which sounds a deep foundation to the whole drama like the ground-tone at the beginning of The Rhine-Gold. […]Nonetheless, there are some valid criticisms to be brought against Ulysses. It seems to me great rather for the things that are in it than for its success as a whole. It is almost as if in distending the story to ten times its natural size he had finally managed to burst it and leave it partially deflated. There must be something wrong with a design which involves so much that is dull—and I doubt whether anyone will defend parts of Ulysses against the charge of extreme dullness.[ …] Now in precisely what is the interest of Ulysses supposed to consist? In the spiritual relationship between Dedalus and Bloom? But too little is done with this. When it is finally realized there is one poignant moment, then a vast tract of anticlimax. This single situation in itself could hardly justify the previous presentation of everything else that has happened to Bloom before on the same day. No, the major theme of the book is to he found in its parallel with the Odyssey: Bloom is a sort of modern Ulysses—with Dedalus as Telemachus—and the scheme and proportions of the novel must be made to correspond to those of the epic. It is these and not the inherent necessities of the subject which have dictated the size and shape of Ulysses. You have, for example, the events of Mr. Bloom’s day narrated at such unconscionable length and the account of Stephen’s synchronous adventures confined almost entirely to the first three chapters because it is only the early books of the Odyssey which are concerned with Telemachus and thereafter the first half of the poem is devoted to the wanderings of Ulysses. You must have a Cyclops, a Nausicaa, an Aeolus, a Nestor and some Sirens and your justification for a full-length Penelope is the fact that there is one in the Odyssey. There is, of course, a point in this, because the adventures of Ulysses were fairly typical; they do represent the ordinary man in nearly every common relation. Yet I cannot but feel that Mr. Joyce made a mistake to have the whole plan of his story depend on the structure of the Odyssey rather than on the natural demands of the situation. I feel that though his taste for symbolism is closely allied with his extraordinary poetic faculty for investing particular incidents with universal significance, nevertheless—because it is the homeless symbolism of a Catholic who has renounced the faith—it sometimes overruns the bounds of art into an arid ingenuity which would make a mystic correspondence do duty for an artistic reason. The result is that one sometimes feels as if the brilliant succession of episodes were taking place on the periphery of a wheel which has no hub.” http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/ulysses July 6, 1922.
James Joyce on Ulysses (and a quote from his conversation with V.Nabokov in 1937)
Excerpts from: A clash of Titans Joyce, Homer and the idea of epic. David Norris http://books.openedition.org/puc/238
Joyce had since a child been fascinated by the story of the Odyssey which he encountered as a boy in a children’s book first published in 1808 Tales of Ulysses by the essayist Charles Lamb known also as Elia. Indeed even after the completion of Ulysses, Joyce was still recommending this small book to friends and commentators as a helpful key to the understanding of his novel. Writing to the Italian critic Carlo Linati on the 21st of September 1920 in a letter which also included a detailed scheme of the structure of Ulysses Joyce wrote as follows:
“It is an epic of two races (Israelite / Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me – even when a boy. Imagine fifteen years ago I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners! For seven years I have been working at this book – blast it! It is also a sort of encyclopaedia. My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri. Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique. Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons – as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts. No English printer wanted to print a word of it. In America the review was suppressed four times. Now, as I hear, a great movement is being prepared against the publication, initiated by puritans, English imperialists, Irish republicans, Catholics – what an alliance! Gosh, I ought to be given the Nobel Prize for peace.”
[…] It is a curious side light on Joyce’s attitude towards the Homeric substructure that he appears to have altered his attitude towards its significance after the initial reception of the book in the 1920’s, in much the same way that he said he thought he could no longer take any interest in music after writing the Sirens episode of the novel because he had exhausted the possibilities of music. This may of course to a certain extent have been conversational attitudinizing during a period in which his interest had transferred to the creation of Finnegans Wake. But it is curious to note the episode retailed by Ellmann in his biography of Joyce which recalls a conversation between the novelist and Vladimir Nabokov in 1937: Joyce said something disparaging about the use of mythology in modern literature. Nabokov replied in amazement, “but you employed Homer!” “A whim,” was Joyce’s comment, “but you collaborated with Gilbert,” Nabokov persisted. “A terrible mistake,” said Joyce, “an advertisement for the book. I regret it very much.”
[…] Similarly although Joyce indicates in the Linati Schema of 1920 the titles of the various episodes of Ulysses that give the most immediate clue to their Homeric correspondence he specifically omits these from the published work. In other words they nowhere appear as chapter titles in the printed version of the novel. It is I think clear that by omitting these titles Joyce was seeking to avoid the displacement of critical attention from his creation onto its epic original and a concentration on measuring the discrepancies between the two works instead of assessing Ulysses as a work of art in its own right.
Vladimir Nabokov on James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Lectures on Literature: “ I must especially warn against seeing in Leopold Bloom’s humdrum wanderings and minor adventures on a summer day in Dublin a close parody of the Odyssey, with the adman Bloom acting the part of Odysseus, otherwise Ulysses, man of many devices, and Bloom’s wife representing chaste Penelope while Stephen Dedalus is given the part of Telemachus. That there is a very vague and very general Homeric echo of the theme of wanderings in Bloom’s case is obvious, as the title of the novel suggests, and there are a number of classical allusions in the course of the book; but it would be a complete waste of time to look for close parallels in every chapter and every scene of the book. There is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth; and after the work had appeared in parts, Joyce promptly deleted the pseudo-Homeric titles of his chapters when he saw what scholarly and pseudoscholarly bores were up to.”
Strong Opinions: “Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those essentially easy and vulgar “Homeric parallelisms” would only distract one’s attention from the real beauty of the book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter titles which already were “explaining” the book to non-readers. In my lectures I tried to give factual data only.”
Playboy interview: "They had to know the map of Dublin for Ulysses. I believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was."