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"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 1.
The opening words of the novel recall the young artist's earliest memories of his father's voice. |
"At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Ulysses, ch. 16, "Eumaeus," The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986).
Bloom on his encounter with the Irish patriot earlier in the day. |
"—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5.
Stephen Dedalus remarks on the speech of the English Catholic Priest in Trinity College and the dilemma for the Anglo-Irish writer. Gaelic was never the answer for Stephen or Joyce. |
"What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Ulysses, ch. 17, "Ithaca," The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986).
Ad man Leopold Bloom thinks about one visionary advertisement. |
"—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
MI said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5.
Stephen Dedalus's friend at Trinity College asks the question about conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. |
"Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Ulysses, ch. 17, "Ithaca," The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986).
Of Leopold Bloom, should he turn up missing. |
"—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5.
Stephen Dedalus responds here to his friend's plea for Irish nationalism. |
"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Ulysses, ch. 13, "Nausicaa," The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986).
Leopold Bloom on the basic Joycean plot. |
"The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5.
The culmination of Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory as the artist recedes from the center to the periphery of his product. |
"What was Stephen's auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.
What was Bloom's visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Ulysses, ch. 17, "Ithaca," The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986).
Leopold Bloom's and Stephen Dedalus's reaction to each other in the catechism chapter of Ulysses. |
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