kleist's on the marionette theater, fencing bears, paul auster, and joyce

First, read Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater."

http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm

Then...

There is obviously a connection between the bear's mindless effectiveness and a Zen mindlessness.

The boy with the thorn, makes me think of the authors in "The Reader's Manifesto" who once they fall in love with the sound of their own "voice," become unable to write anything but drivel.

The less we see the "light" of an author's style, the more the characters shine through. The "grace" in Joyce comes from his complete self-effacement as a stylist when considering his characters. When the style becomes lyrical, the luminousness is projected onto the characters, not Joyce. It is at this point that the "jointed man" touches the "god."

ages

Stephen is 22; Bloom is 38.

kundera's composition teacher on beethoven, parallels with lyrical passages in ulysses

To show his solidarity to a jewish composer who was forced to wear the yellow star, Kundera's father hired him to give his son lessons in composition. One day, the composer said to the young Kundera: "There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is these weak passages that make the strong passages stand out. It's like a lawn without which we could not appreciate the beautiful tree growing in the middle."

Are the "low" styles of Ulysses a great big set-up for short, lyrical passages, patiently setting the passages up to blow us away? That's certainly the effect these lyrical paragraphs have on me.

I'm reminded of a live performance by pianist Rudolf Firkusny: He played almost an entire piece in hushed, barely audible tones to set up a banging, loud, brief finale. The parts of the piece were subordinated to the effect of the piece as a whole. It worked.

kundera/joyce

Kundera writes in Les testaments trahis:

"D'emblée, tout ce qui restait encore en moi de méfiant à l'égard de l'art du roman disparut: en donnant a chaque partie le caractère d'une nouvelle, j'ai rendu inutile toute la la technique apparemment inévitable de la grande composition romanesque. J'ai rencontré dans mon entreprise la vieille stratégie de Chopin, la stratégie de la petite composition qui n'a pas besoin de passages a-thématiques. Je me suis débarrassé des araignées."

His point is that in writing a novel with seven shorter and mostly independent chapters, he avoided some of the risks and pitfalls of attempting a "big" novel. He calls this the "Chopin strategy" because Chopin avoided the pitfalls of longer compositions by sticking to shorter forms.

(Kundera says that the parts of his novel, read independently of the others, would lose a great deal of their meaning. That reminds me of the Ruskin quotation.)

Is this what Joyce is doing in Ulysses?

Also: a narrator, like a father, is a necessary evil. Does Joyce somewhat randomly hand over narration to 18 slightly bogus Homeric narrators just to be rid of the responsibility of coming up with a narrator?

brawn

brawn is head cheese

mme de guermantes, continued

Maybe in speaking the way she does, Mme de Guermantes is being truly noble. In this analogy, Joyce's love of low styles reveals true literary merit, integrity, and lack of pretentiousness.

mme de guermantes = james joyce

"Certes, dans l'affectation avec laquelle cette voix faisait apparaître par moments une rudesse de terroir, il y avait bien des choses: l'origine toute provinciale d'un rameau de la famille de Guermantes, resté plus longtemps localisé, plus hardi, plus sauvageon, plus provocant; puis l'habitude de gens vraiment distingués et de gens d'esprit qui savent que la distinction n'est pas de parler du bout des lèvres, et aussi de nobles fraternisant plus volontiers avec leurs paysans qu'avec des bourgeois; toutes particularités que la situation de reine de Mme de Guermantes lui avait permis d'exhiber plus facilement, de faire sortir toutes voiles dehors."

Marcel Proust
A la recherche du temps perdu
II, 494

Mme de Guermantes' snobbery takes the form of the most recherché anti-snobbiness. Is Joyce's love of lowbrow styles (Nausicaa) a similar kind of snobbery? Can one laugh distainfully at a style and still love it with a true love? Joyce certainly is in a "kingly" position to "let out the sails" of his love of low styles.

ps "parler du bout des lèvres" = "finding one's voice" or writing "stylishly" as in The Reader's Manifesto (google and read)

make the pattern, break the pattern

As contrived and structured as the chapters of Ulysses are, they often contain a lyrical passage towards the end which is written in a mode unrelated to the style and theme of the chapter and unrelated to the style and mode of thinking of the character or narrator in question. The style of these passages is the style of the last paragraph of “The Dead”: pure poetry. Or pure corn. Was Joyce lowbrow at heart? Middlebrow? Is this one reason Ulysses is so baffling?

the ineluctable modalities of ulysses

The Nacheinander and Nebeneinander of Ulysses: the stream of consciousness is the Nacheinander: thoughts one after another in time. The juxtaposition of styles and chapters is the Nebeneinander: styles, modes, moods, times of day against/alongside/side by side/juxtaposed one against the other. Is Stephen intuiting the form of Ulysses in “Proteus”? Do Joyce’s styles in Ulysses add the Nebeneinander of visual art to the Nacheinander of reading fiction?


nach: after
neben: next
einander: one another