Autor(en)

de Almeida, Hermione:

Verlag / Jahr

Columbia University Press, 1981.

Format / Einband

Leinen / Cloth. 233 p.

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 550 g

Bestell-Nr

1196370

Bemerkungen

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langjährigem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Altersbedingt leicht vergilbt, sonst gutes Exemplar / Slightly yellowed due to age, otherwise good copy. - Flayed by the boy’s canes, his flesh torn by barbed wire, Stephen Dedalus, like any good martyr, would rather be persecuted for his beliefs than admit the poet was ‘no good’. Dedalus’s experience is one Joyce had as an adolescent; his estimate of Byron, Ellmann tells us, was his creator’s, one Joyce held to in later life.2 The opinion is certainly in character for melancholic, self-centered young artists. We presume that the mature Joyce, by showing his youthful persona’s affinity with Byron, declared his own aversion to the poet and egocentric Byronism. It would be difficult to find two more antipathetic writers than Byron and Joyce. The former, a man of action, wrote verse because it was ‘in fashion’. The latter, a man of introspection, wrote prose because it was most fitting to the breadth and high intention of his art. The first was a worldly nobleman, a parliamentarian, philanderer, philanthropist and collector — of, according to Shelley’s count, ten horses, eight dogs, five cats, five peacocks, three monkeys, two guinea hens, an eagle, crow, falcon and Egyptian crane, plus an indeterminate number of bears, women, Greek turtles, retainers, bastards and, albeit unwillingly, Yahoos (the little Hunts); he was a man who exulted in his reputation as the unfaithful, unprincipled roué who had murdered his mistress and made her skull into a drinking cup, who had conjoined saintly Annabella Milbanke with the devil for one long year, who was known to favor all political novelties, and who, a true courtier, tossed off idle verse without remuneration and published only at his friends’ request. The second was a family man, unacceptably poor and lower-class, bookish, withdrawn, a nearpriest whose only collections were a brood of starving, quarrelling siblings, a series of domestic crises, and a set of anti-social legends - by his own account, he was known to be a crafty, cynical, selfish, dissimulating Ulysses-type, a jejunejesuit, a dour Aberdeen minister, a spy in Switzerland, a cocaine addict in Trieste, a dying man in New York, a crazy who carried four watches and always asked the time, a kind of Dick Swiveller, and a good-for-nothing;3 he espoused no politics, loved but one woman and, a consecrated artist, sacrificed motherland, mother Church, and Mother Joyce to his calling, and made much of his ability to live, and sometimes starve, on the profits of his art. One lent his name to the mood that was a hallmark of the Romantic age; the other’s name became synonymous with the spirit of nihilistic modernism, with chaos, alienation and futility. The antipathies in temperament carry over to Byron’s and Joyce’s primary works. Don Juan and Ulysses seem to be quite inimical. The poem is a merry, random, careless, digressionary sail through the sophisticated world and its inheritance, apparently indifferent to the literary flotsam that surfaces in the passage. Undisciplined, subjective, reading like the public chatter of a gossip column, it tells of a young boy’s adventures; some would say it is written for the uneducated eye and ear, that it is surface poetry holding no secrets from the mind, the product of a crude ear. The novel, on the other hand, is a web of scrupulous organization, precision and literary competence. Patterned and highly objective, reading like a compendium of abstruse learning for the select, it tells of Ulysses in a modern Ithaca; most would agree that its cross-references and symbolic minutiae make it profound, secretive literature, that it is a private myth, the product of a refined mind.

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