Aquel Dublín de las retóricas II

Aquel Dublín de las retóricas

Parece que Poldy es el único que trabaja en la metrópoli hiberniana. El otro día un columnista poco generoso con el premio nobel fallecido, se atrevía a decir que "nuestro" Poldy era hombre de silencios. En Duke me enseñaron muchas reglas, pero la que no se me ha olvidado, la regla angular, es decir tres cosas buenas de los vivos y los muertos antes de hacer una crítica. En fin, que ya empezamos con la digresión y eso que no me he atrevido a desobedecer a Eolo. Hasta los escritores encantadores parecen envidiosos si no lo hacen. Tres, tres, tres, mi admirado.
El viento norte asusta a las palomas y olmo llora.
En el Sabath no se trabaja, pero estamos a jueves y esa clase se arremolina alrededor de la columna de Nelson, "En el corazón de la metrópoli hiberniana".La columna que voló el IRA en los sesenta, un trabajo impecable, decía mi querida amiga May Moroony. Stephen y Poldy trabajan, también las meretrices y las camareras, debemos respirar profundo para ganarnos la vida. Limpiabotas y Edward Rex.
 Exordium magnífico que me lleva a Blackrock a Sandymount Green. Son tantos los recuerdos.
Macintosh, has anybody seen Kelly, sí Macintosh, es él. ¿Quién habla?
Ibsen fue el primero, los iguales se reconocen. Y Joyce aprendió noruego y danés.

Limpiabotas, Edward Rex, carreteros, cerveza y Poldy preocupado por su cliente Alexander Keyes. No puedo escribir Llavees. Poldy trabaja deprisa, queda mucho día para meditar y los placeres eróticos.Freeman´s Journal y "esos señores de prensa", Red Murry, el tío de Joyce y de Stephen...

Let Erin Remember the Days of Old - Thomas Moore (1808)

Feliz Día del Libro. Nos vemos la semana próxima.

San Jorge nos proteja de la ignorancia, but deliver us from evil.

Episode VII AEOLUS -- Presented by Terence Killeen

James Joyce reading from Ulysses

Recording

First Recording – ‘Aeolus’ – 1924

The first recording of Joyce reading from his work was organised by Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses. Late in 1924, she went to the Paris branch of the Gramophone Company (which owned the label His Master’s Voice) and asked if they would make a recording of Joyce reading. She was directed to Piero Coppola, an Italian composer and conductor, who was then artistic director of His Master’s Voice in Paris.

Coppola told Beach there was no public demand for anything other than music recordings, but he agreed they could make a recording for her. However, the recording would have to be made at her expense, and it wouldn’t have the ‘His Master’s Voice’ label on it or be listed in their catalogue. Beach agreed to his terms.

According to Beach, Joyce himself was anxious to make this recording. Joyce had chosen to read John F Taylor’s speech from the ‘Aeolus’ episode, claiming it was the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, and that being declamatory in style it was therefore suitable for recital.

But Beach believed he hadn’t chosen it for these reasons alone. She felt that the passage “expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice” (Beach: 171). MJC Hodgart, writing later about the same passage, claimed that it is “a truly inspired statement of Joyce’s artistic credo…” (Hodgart: 121).

(It’s not clear, however, if Joyce had originally intended to read from a different part of Ulysses. On 16 November 1924, he wrote to Harriet Weaver saying that he was learning a page of the ‘Sirens’ episode for the recording, and he repeats this to Valery Larbaud in a letter of 20 November, just a week before the recording was due to happen.)

As Joyce was preparing for the recording session, he was suffering with severe eye problems. His eye specialist, Doctor Borsch, decided at the beginning of November that Joyce would have to undergo another eye operation and had scheduled it for November 27. However, Joyce asked for it to be deferred until 28 November so that he could make the recording.

On Thursday 27 November 1924, Joyce travelled with Sylvia Beach by taxi to the Paris suburb of Billancourt, where the record company’s factory was located. The journey seemed long, and Joyce was suffering both from his eyes and from nerves, but he soon felt at home with Piero Coppola, with whom he discussed music in Italian.

Beach says that the recording was an ordeal for Joyce. The first attempt to record failed – apparently because Joyce faltered – and they had to begin again. In the end, the recording took up one side of a twelve-inch disc and it lasts just over four minutes. Two days after the recording, Joyce underwent his sixth eye operation, to remove a cataract from his left eye.

Given that the Gramophone Company wouldn’t produce the record under the HMV label, it seems that Joyce took the time to design his own record label. His sketch for a record label is now in the James Joyce Collection at the University at Buffalo, along with several of the original records.

In her memoirs, Sylvia Beach acknowledged that the HMV recording was rather primitive and not a technical success. However, it remains the only recording Joyce made from Ulysses, and Beach said it was her favourite of the two recordings: “I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved” (Beach: 171).

Sylvia Beach ordered thirty copies of the record, to be paid for on delivery. The records were not intended for sale, and most of the copies were given to Joyce who gave them away to friends and family. Beach kept a couple of records herself, and admitted that she later sold them at a stiff price when she was hard up.

The boys of Wexford

Aeolus

The Rhetorics of Fiction and Politics in the Aeolus Episode of Ulysses

"They had heard, or had heard said, or had heard said written" Finnegans Wake 369:16

As everyone has remarked, the business of this episode is rhetoric. But in a fairly obvious sense the business of all the episodes is rhetoric: how to find a style that best communicates the thoughts of a half-educated man as he goes about his business in a provincial capital of the British Empire in 1904; the thoughts of his uneducated wife mulling over her past and present without melancholy in the middle of the night; the musings of an overeducated young man walking alone with his thoughts on a beach; the conversation of a group of intellectuals discussing literary history; the talk of another group of educated men discussing and practicing rhetoric as here in this episode. 1

How do you convey the rather chaotic reality of a group conversation in a place of business with its many interruptions without at the same time presenting the reader with chaos? How do you make the report an artistic daedalian construct that displays the individual parts without seeming like a collection of disjecta membra? It is the question that Stephen Dedalus tried to grapple with on the beach in "Proteus": how to turn the protean flux of life into an artistic "thing".

1

In James Joyce's Ulysses (194-8) Stuart Gilbert has four pages of rhetorical forms used in this episode. An appendix doing much the same can be found in Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated (2nd ed., Berkeley: U of California Press, 1988), p.635 ff.

12 (...) 

Thomond Gate

The Rose of Castile, I'M SOV'REIGN HERE by Michael Balfe

Vuela Pluma. Hitchcock

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

K.M.R.I.A

Friedrich von Flotow - Martha (1844-47). Soplan buenos personajes, volamos a Eolo

Leonora Carrington, la surrealista celta

Madrid Players, English Player, Jim, James, Madrid, Zurich. No os perdáis el Tributo a Anthony Trollope