(Sunset in Phoenix Park, Dublin, 2004)

I saw Molly Bloom on a hillock under a sky full of moonlit clouds rushing overhead. She had just picked up from the grass a child’s black coffin and flung it after the figure of a man passing down a side road by the field she was in. It struck his shoulders, and she said, “I’ve done with you.” The man was Bloom seen from behind. There was a shout of laughter from some American journalists in the road opposite, led by Ezra Pound. I was very indignant and vaulted over a gate into the field and strode up to her and delivered the one speech of my life. It was very long, eloquent and full of passion, explaining all the last episode of Ulysses to her. She wore a black opera cloak, or sortie de bal, had become slightly grey and looked like la Duse. She smiled when I ended on an astronomical climax, and then, bending, picked up a tiny snuffbox, in the form of a little black coffin, and tossed it towards me, saying, “And I have done with you, too, Mr. Joyce.” I had a snuffbox like the one she tossed to me when I was at Clongowes Wood College. It was given to me by my godfather, Philip McCann, together with a larger one to fill it from.

بنا به عقیده ادوارد سعید، "شرق شناسی" شیوه قدرت نمایی غرب برای بازسازی و استیلا بر شرق است؛ لذا فرهنگ اروپایی با کناره گیری از فرهنگ شرق (بیگانه) به قدرت و هویت دست یافته است. هامی بابا، یکی دیگر از شرق شناسان، عقیده دارد که شرق شناسی متشکل از دو بخش است: 1) موضوعی برای آموختن، اکتشاف، و تمرین؛ و 2) بستری از آرزوها، تصاویر، رویاها، و اسطوره ها. به عبارتی می توان گفت که شرق رؤیای جمعی و ناخودآگاه غرب است. در نهایت، شرق شناسی به تصویر سیاسی واقعیتی مبدل شده است که ساختار آن بر تفاوت بین آشنا (اروپا، غرب) و بیگانه (آسیا، شرق) اصرار می ورزد. این بیگانگی به دو صورت متجلی می شود: بیگانگی به صورت تفاوت (ابتدایی، متوحش، خرفت) به همان صورت که انگلستان در قرن نوزده و ابتدای قرن بیست سعی در نشان دادن ایرلند دارد، و بیگانگی به صورت اشتیاق (راز، لذت، فراوانی، و نعمت) که برخی از  شخصیت های جویس سعی در رسیدن به آن دارند. هر دو وجه این بیگانگی به یکدیگر وابسته بوده و برخی از نیازهای استدلالی فرهنگ را پاسخگو هستند. آثار جویس نیز، از آن رو که او به عنوان یک ایرلندی/بیگانه در برابر بریتانیا/اروپا قرار می گیرد، به شدت با مفاهیم شرق، غیر بومی، عجیب و غریب، و بیگانه در هم آمیخته است. از راویان رمانتیک و خردسال داستان های دوبلینی ها و استیون ددالوس جوان تصویر هنرمند گرفته تا ریچارد روان تبعیدی ها و استیون ددالوس پخته تر اما مأیوس اولیس و شم بیداری فینیگان، همه خودآگاهانه یا ناخودآگاهانه سعی در گریز از تورهای سرزمین مادری، زبان، و مذهب داشته و در اشتیاق مکانی دور و پر رمز و راز می سوزند. به همین خاطر هم این شخصیت ها با دیگر شخصیت های دور و برشان متفاوت بوده و به آن ها به چشم بیگانه/یاغی نگریسته می شود. جستجوی روح رمانتیک زندگی و هنر در شرق (جایی دور از دوبلین) میسر است زیرا که غرب (جایی نزدیک به دوبلین) در حال فروپاشی معنوی است.

برای لمس قدرت و تسلط جیمز جویس بر کلمات و عبارات کافی است به بخشی از رمان تصویر هنرمند توجه کنیم. یکی از شیوه هایی که توسط آن جویس درونمایه های کلیدی مورد نظرش را بیان می کند ترکیب درام و حماسه در دل محتوایی تغزلی با استفاده از کلمات ساده و شفافی است که از غنای نمادین خاصی برخوردارند. در بخش چهارم از تصویر هنرمند، سرپرست کشیشان از استیون می خواهد تا به دفترش برود تا با او در مورد حرفه آینده اش، یعنی "کشیش شدن"، صحبت کند. حیفم آمد که این بخش را ترجمه کنم چون غنا و حسن انتخاب واژه ها به کلی از بین می رفت:

The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind, Stephen stood before him, following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylights above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. The priest’s face was in total shadow, but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull.

هیچ یک از عبارت های "طناب حلقه شده پرده"، "سایه"، و "جمجمه" به صورت تصادفی انتخاب نشده اند. تکرار عبارت "نوری که رنگ می بازد" به این نکته که دفتر کشیش به شکلی نمادین طبیعت را نفی می کند اشاره دارد؛ برای تکمیل این معنی "کشیش پشتش هم به سوی نور" قرار می گیرد. "crossblind" می تواند دو مفهوم "blind to the cross" (صلیب را نمی بیند) و "blinded by the cross" (صلیب او را نابینا کرده) را تداعی کند. حالا بماند که رنگ "قهوه ای" یاد آور حضور فلج و تباهی دوبلین است. انحنا و برآمدگی جمجمه کشیش ایماژ گویای مرگ است. اما ایماژ اصلی و مرکزی این بخش، که خود اپی فنی برخورد بین استیون و کشیش به شمار می رود، در حرکات انگشتان کشیش که با طناب پرده بازی می کند نهفته است: "به آرامی طناب پرده دیگر را تابانیده و به شکل حلقه در می آورد". آیا این می تواند چیزی به جز حلقه طناب دار باشد؟ ما بعد در اولیس هم با مأمور اعدام حماسی (ملک الموت) روبرو خواهیم شد که از او تحت عنوان "خدای مأمور اعدام" یاد می شود.

جیمز جویس در دوبلینی ها با چنان وسواسی عنوان داستان هایش را انتخاب کرده است که بعضی اوقات باید داستان را چند بار خواند تا بتوان به درون هسته معنایی عنوان رخنه کرده و ارتباط آن را با داستان کشف کرد. داستان "یک ابر کوچک" ("A Little Cloud") از این ویژگی مستثنی نیست. بحث و نظر در مورد عنوان این داستان بیشمار بوده و اکثر منتقدین در این مورد که عنوان داستان می تواند از منابع زیر الهام گرفته شده باشد اتفاق نظر دارند: الف) اولین بخش کتاب شاهان در انجیل عهد عتیق؛ ب) بند بیست و ششم دوزخ دانته. شخصیت اصلی داستان، یعنی چندلر کوچک (Little Chandler)، یکی دیگر از دوبلینی هایی است که محکوم به ماندن در آغوش مام مفلوج وطن بوده، اسم و جثه و وضعیت زندگی اش به شدت ترحم برانگیز است. او به دوست قدیمی اش، گالاهر، که چند سالی ست خود را از تله جغرافیایی دوبلین رهانیده و در لندن زندگی می کند به شکل معصومانه ای حسادت می کند، چون گالاهر در زندگی حسابی پیشرفت کرده و حتی شهری مانند پاریس را از نزدیک دیده است. چندلر کوچک در سر هوای شاعر شدن دارد، اما تا رسیدن به لحظه شهود آخر داستان اندک امید واهی (به کوچکی یک تکه ابر) او مانع از باور این حقیقت می شود که در دایره دوبلین او نقطه تسلیم است. تقابل چندلر کوچک با طفل خردسال خود و تأکید نویسنده در عدم توانایی این پدر کوچک اندام در ساکت نگاه داشتن طفل گریان می تواند به نکته جالب توجهی در مورد عنوان داستان اشاره کند. مثلث "ابر کوچک"، "چندلر کوچک"، و "بچه کوچک" اشاره ای گویا و در خور توجه به مجموعه شعری از ویلیام بلیک با عنوان “Songs of Experience” دارد. از دیدگاه این شاعر رومانتیک انگلیسی، "معصومیت" و "تجربه" دو موقعیت متضاد روح بشر است. فاصله بین عصر معصومیت تا گرداب تجربه به کوتاهی فاصله گهواره تا جامعه است. طفل خردسال چندلر، که از سوی مادر "مرد کوچک من" خوانده می شود، تنها در آغوش مادر آرام می گیرد (همچون تمثال مسیح خردسال در آغوش مریم مقدس). چنین به ظاهر شعف و آرامش کودکانه در تقابل با تصویر چندلر کوچک که به عنوان پدر، همسر، و شاعر خود را شکست خورده دیده و به گرمای اشک پشیمانی و حسرت پناه می برد، قرار می گیرد. این همان لحظه شهود، یا به قول جویس اپی فنی، است که می توان کاملاً در شعر "Infant Sorrow" لمس کرد:

My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swadling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

در انتهای داستان، جویس با زیرکی جای چندلر را با طفل خردسالش عوض می کند تا مفهوم اندوه کوچک بلیکی عمیق تر جلوه کند. می توان امتداد نگاه جویس را از شادمانی بی سبب و کوچک چندلر تا اندوه کوچک (بزرگ؟) او دنبال کرد: اندوهی که جانشین معصومیت کودکی شده است. آیا می تواند خود را دیگر بار در ابر کوچکش پنهان کند؟ 

  A volume of Byron’s poems lay before him on the table. He opened it cautiously with his left hand lest he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book:

Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom,

Not e’en a Zephyr wanders through the grove,

Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb

And scatter flowers on the dust I love.

  He paused. He left the rhythm of the verse about him in the room. How melancholy it was! Could he, too, write like that, express the melancholy of his soul in verse? There were so many things he wanted to describe: his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge, for example. If he could get back again into that mood…

  The child awoke and began to cry. He turned from the page and tried to hush it: but it would not be hushed. He began to rock it to and fro in his arms but its wailing cry grew keener. He rocked it faster while his eyes began to read the second stanza:

Within this narrow cell reclines her clay,

That clay where once…

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life.

(from “A Little Cloud”: Dubliners)

“Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain.”
--James Joyce, 1934

Most accounts of James Joyce's family portray Lucia Joyce as the mad daughter of a man of genius, a difficult burden. But in this important new book, Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different, more dramatic truth: Lucia's father not only loved her but shared with her a deep creative bond. His daughter, Joyce wrote, had a mind "as clear and as unsparing as the lightning."

Born at a pauper's hospital in Trieste in 1907, educated haphazardly in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris as her penniless father pursued his art, Lucia was determined to strike out on her own. She chose dance as her medium, pursuing her studies in an art form very different from the literary ones celebrated in the Joyce circle and emerging, to Joyce's amazement, as a harbinger of modern expressive dance in Paris. He described her then as a wild, beautiful, "fantastic being" who spoke "a curious abbreviated language of her own" that he instinctively understood—for in fact it was his as well. The family's only reader of Joyce's work, Lucia was a child of the imaginative realms her father created. Even after emotional turmoil wreaked havoc with her and she was hospitalized in the 1930s, Joyce saw in her a life lived in tandem with his own.

Though most of the documents about Lucia have been destroyed, Shloss has painstakingly reconstructed the poignant complexities of her life—and with them a vital episode in the early history of psychiatry, for in Joyce's efforts to help his daughter he sought out Europe's most advanced doctors, including Jung. Lucia emerges in Shloss's account as a gifted, if thwarted, artist in her own right, a child who became her father's tragic muse.

In Lucia's world, beautifully rendered in this remarkable narrative, Shloss has uncovered fascinating material that deepens our understanding of Finnegans Wake, the book that redefined modern literature. Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake is a milestone work in the study of art in the making, as well as a thought-provoking meditation on fathers and daughters. Through the life of Lucia Joyce we see the birth of modernism not just as a series of texts but as a mode of daring.

"Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip . . . an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver . . . [Shaun continues an anatomization of Shem and then describes how Shem] dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe asking, when is a man not a man? (Finnegans Wake: 169.11-170.5)"

The first riddle of the universe, then, becomes a riddle of origins, and one continually invoked throughout the text: "When is a man not a man?" This question implies a network of corresponding riddles that rests at the core of Joyce's Wake: "what is the beginning of man?" "what is the end of man?" "what makes up man?" and so forth. The riddle is never answered-at least not directly. While Shaun views Shem's riddle as evidence that even Shem must admit the artist is a "sham," much more than Shem's self-indictment is at stake in the chapter: ultimately, the episode (and much of the remainder of the Wake) dramatizes man's struggle toward renewal. Joyce thus signals the place of the "shaman" in re-animating "man" through the magic of words: "nam[e]." Shem's riddle is essentially an ontological project-caught up in the metaphysics of "seeing" and "knowing," the lyric project of riddles, but now it enters the dramatic structure of Joyce's Wake.

In the more than sixty years that we have looked back at the high modernist period, literary scholars have contented themselves largely with repeatedly and quite uncritically accepting Eisenstein's account of James Joyce's interest especially in Potemkin (1925) as paradigmatic and complete in determining how we should understand the 1920s interest of writers in film. Literary scholars' views have been based on a perceived kinship between technical elements used or implied in Ulysses and in Eisenstein's work; indeed, Joyce's show of interest was particularly valued and often repeated by Eisenstein, who was searching for ways to demonstrate cinema's connection to all major forms of art, and who well knew the benefits of identifying with Joyce...

The importance of James Joyce to twentieth century music is perhaps as surprising as it is pervasive. Influence within art forms tends to stay within disciplinary boundaries. It’s no great surprise to find musicians influenced by preceding musicians, or authors influenced by other authors; but Joyce’s influence over a range of music is perhaps without precedent. This influence was largely conceptual, as opposed to lines of influence in the nineteenth century, when composers used authors almost entirely by settings their texts or rifling their works for plots for tone poems or operas. Unlike Goethe’s work, for instance, whose Romanticism tended to attract aesthetically like-minded composers, Joyce’s work influenced a wide range of composers of almost impossibly divergent aesthetic presuppositions. In part, this reflects the variety of Joyce’s writings. His earliest prose works, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are based on late nineteenth century models of naturalism and symbolism, while his major works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake become increasingly experimental in their reconceptualization of literary form, style, character, and language, until Finnegans Wake can scarcely be said to have a conventional plot or characters at all. At the same time, Joyce wrote two collections of poems as well as a play, Exiles, which are distinctly traditional in form and tone. Composers have been drawn to these diverse sides of Joyce, in many cases the more traditional tonal and Romantic composers finding a congenial set of texts for setting from the poetry -- and Myra T. Russel has noted that there are well over 140 composers who have set them -- while the more avant-garde musicians of the twentieth century were attracted to the formal innovations suggested by Joyce’s work, by his use in Ulysses of a variety of different styles, by the musicality of his language, particularly in the late and highly experimental Finnegans Wake.

What does it mean to be a modernist?

First of all, whereas many previous writers had celebrated the developments in civilization that accompanied the rise of cities, the modernist is hostile to city life, finding that it degrades and demeans its citizens (see, for example, that essential modernist poem, The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot). Note, among many other features, that brown is the most frequently used color in Joyce's Dubliners. Indeed, the modernist finds culture itself to be drab and shallow, and this attitude prevails in Joyce's stories. Examples from just the first four stories illustrate this:

"The Sisters": religious culture dampens the young boy's growth
"An Encounter": the city offers no real adventures of mind and spirit
"Araby": the boy's burgeoning sexuality is threatened by religion, politics, and economics
"Eveline": the demands of the family take precedence over romantic involvement

The modernist contends that we live in a world that offers no meaning or purpose to existence, one in which we feel alienated from self and others, in which there are no clear moral standards. Modernist writers consider that twentieth-century society makes self-recognition and self-knowledge impossible. In "The Dead," Gabriel illustrates powerfully that even an intelligent, educated, sensitive man can deceive himself about his own nature and that of his family. Indeed the most devastating critique of this society is that it is one in which love is absent: in "Two Gallants" and "The Boarding House," lust has taken the place of love; in "A Little Cloud" love -- if it ever existed -- has vanished from the family scene; in "A Painful Case" there can be no love in a world where society condemns it.

The brief story "Araby" can serve as an example of the dual realistic and symbolic nature of Joyce's stories. On the realistic level the story is simply about the feelings a young boy has for a neighborhood girl, and his despair when he goes to a fair with the intention of buying the girl a present and finds he is too late; as such, it is a tender and moving story, the kind of childhood disappointments many of us have experienced. However, subtly interwoven into the story, in ways that do not intrude upon the realistic level, are recurrent religious, political, and sexual images that can be read on a symbolic level and show the story to be a timeless one in which the boy has glorified his everyday experience into a medieval search for the Holy Grail, transformed his sexual attraction to the girl into a sacred (religious) one, and whose desires are frustrated by political (British) and religious (Catholic) forces beyond his recognition or awareness.

How Joyce feels about the people he writes about has been the subject of much analysis. Joyce himself wrote that he was writing with a "scrupulous meanness" and wrote of the "special odor of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories." [1] However, an author's stated intent is not to be taken as the final word, and certainly each reader will have to decide whether the stories reveal an ironic dislike for these characters or a criticism that is sympathetic. (The tenderest account of these Dubliners is in "The Dead," a story written a few years after the others when Joyce was living in Rome and had, among foreigners, begun to appreciate Irish warmth and hospitality.)

In these stories Joyce exposes the sentimentality of his characters, and he employs a bare style that sets itself off from nineteenth-century writings; indeed, T. S. Eliot observed that Joyce "destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century."

The continuity of Joyce’s characters does not include only the living characters, but, on the contrary, many of the repeated characters whom one may encounter throughout Joyce’s works consist of the dead, the ghosts (the shadows)…[The dead] haunt places and minds wandering all around Dublin; they emerge from the very opening lines of ‘The Sisters’ and vanish into the closing lines of Finnegans Wake…According to Benstock, gnomon of Euclid “resurfaces thousands of years later in the opening paragraph of ‘The Sisters’” (519). He also suggests that the gnomon “is a nonappearance suggesting a presence made palpable only by the concept of its absence” (520)…When a parallelogram is removed from one of the corners of a parallelogram, the remainder is called a ‘gnomon.’ Gnomon suggests both presence (characters living) and absence (characters dead)…Accordingly, in Joyce’s works, sometimes, the ghosts and the dead outnumber the living, giving color to the still and paralyzed condition of those who are present…

[An excerpt from my M. A. thesis entitled as Dubliners Revisited: A Study of the Continuity of Characters in James Joyce (From Dubliners to Finnegans Wake), October 1999, Shiraz University.]

Definitions:

Def. 1. Any rectangular parallelogram is said to be contained by the two straight lines containing the right angle.
Def. 2. And in any parallelogrammic area let any one whatever of the parallelograms about its diameter with the two complements be called a gnomon.

Guide:

 According to the first definition, the rectangle ABCD illustrated on the left is contained by the lines AB and BC, and this rectangle can be called the rectangle AB by BC. Of course, it could also be called the rectangle BC by CD, or two other names.
On the right, in the parallelogram EFGH, there is a diameter EG with a parallelogram LNGO about it and the two complements KLOF and MHNL, and these three parallelograms together make up the gnomon. In other words a gnomon is an L-shaped figure made by removing a parallelogram from a larger similar parallelogram. (The "g" in "gnomon" is silent.)

Euclid illustrated gnomons by arcs of circles around the inner vertex. In this example, the gnomon is called the gnomon PQR.

Shall I Wear a White Rose?

Music by Emily Bardsley Farmer;
words by H. Saville Clarke

Most of Molly's repertoire dates from the 1880s and early 1890s, when she would have been a young singer. This piece, in a noticeably older style, is from the late 1860s or early 1870s and must have been one of Molly's first songs, as she knew it in Gibraltar.

Joyce was attracted to it for the scene it sets of a woman (Penelope/Molly) waiting for the return of her lover after a long voyage: "I must look my fairest when tomorrow's here; He will come to claim me! Shall I still be dear? I must look my brightest on that happy day, As his fancy drew me when so far away." In the recapitulation we have a glimpse of Ulysses/Poldy, as well: "I shall need no roses if his heart be true" — to me, at least, another indication the morning will bring reconciliation and a new start.

Add to this the song's dreamy heroine attempting to choose between white roses and red ones (traditional symbols of sacred and profane love) and it is clear why Joyce added it to Molly's music roll and used it in the most famous ending in literature:

"Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

The broken collaged watch
and the blueprint of shattered glass
reiterates the nature
of Joyce's "A Painful Case."
(Susan Weil)

I
felt a need
to immerse myself
in the words, sensing the echoes
and the refraction's of Joyce's
immense and rocky
complexity
(Susan Weil)

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend  
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.  
    Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-  
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy 
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor 
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse 
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper 
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in 
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a 
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory 
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. 
    The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-  
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the 
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, 
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends 
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: 
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park 
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev- 
linsfirst loved livvy.

Alfred Heller

A native New Yorker and an avid Joycean, the multi-talented Alfred Heller is a composer, a conductor, an accomplished pianist, and a music publisher. The protégé of Heitor Villa-Lobos, Heller worked with the late Brazilian composer on several of his later works, conducting the premiere recording of Forest of the Amazon. As a composer, Heller is drawn to tonal music, and his settings of poems by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Joyce have been praised for their beauty and sensitivity.

Marylin Monroe reads Ulysses...

A Flower Given to My Daughter
  
 
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time's wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

James Joyce
 

The Hotel Lenox
(9 rue de l’Université)

The Joyce family’s first temporary lodgings in Paris,
recommended by Ezra Pound in the
fashionable 7th arrondissement on the Left Bank.

James Joyce and the Volta Cinematograph

One of the more surprising corners of James Joyce's life is that he ran Ireland's first cinema. Recently there has been growing critical interest in the films shown at the Volta Cinematograph (located at Mary Street, Dublin) and in what influence early film might have had on Joyce's art.

Luke McKernan, author of an article on the Volta in Film and Film Culture, has traced a number of the films exhibited by Joyce. He will introduce this special programme, featuring comedies, religious and historical dramas and news films from 1909, including Come Cretinetti paga I debiti, Une Pouponnière à Paris, and The Way of the Cross.

Pictured is a still image from the 1907 film Francesca da Rimini, directed by William V. Ranous and featuring Florence Turner as Francesca. The film opened at the Volta Cinema in Dublin in January 1910.

Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on 16 June in Dublin and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The day is a secular holiday in Ireland. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

Bloomsday Activities
 
Street party in North Great George's Street, 2004The day involves a range of cultural activities including Ulysses readings and dramatisations, pub crawls and general merriment, much of it hosted by the James Joyce Centre in North Great George's Street. Enthusiasts often dress in Edwardian costume to celebrate Bloomsday, and retrace Bloom's route around Dublin via landmarks such as Davy Byrne's pub. Hard-core devotees have even been known to hold marathon readings of the entire novel, some lasting up to 36 hours. The first celebration took place in 1954, and a major five-month-long festival (ReJoyce Dublin 2004) took place in Dublin between 1 April and 31 August 2004. On the Sunday in 2004 before the 100th "anniversary" of the fictional events described in the book, 10,000 people in Dublin were treated to a free, open-air, full Irish breakfast on O'Connell Street consisting of sausages, rashers, toast, beans, and black and white puddings, and a pint of Guinness.

The Rosenbach Museum & Library, in Philadelphia, United States, is the home of the handwritten manuscript of Ulysses and celebrates Bloomsday with a street festival including readings, Irish music, and traditional Irish cuisine provided by local Irish-themed pubs.

The Syracuse James Joyce Club holds an annual Bloomsday celebration at Johnston's BallyBay Pub in Syracuse, New York, at which large portions of the book are either read aloud, or presented as dramatizations by costumed performers. The club awards scholarships and other prizes to students who have written essays on Joyce or fiction pertaining to his work. The city is home to Syracuse University, whose press has published or reprinted several volumes of Joyce studies.

In 2004 Vintage Publishers issued "yes I said yes I will Yes: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses", and 100 Years of Bloomsday, edited by Nola Tully. It is one of the few monographs that details the increasing popularity of Bloomsday. The book's title comes from the novel's famous last lines.

Bloomsday has been celebrated since 1994 in the Hungarian town of Szombathely, the birthplace of Leopold Bloom's father, Virág Rudolf an emigrant Hungarian Jew. The event is usually centered around the Iseum, the remnants of an Isis temple from Roman times, and the Blum-mansion, commemorated to Joyce since 1997, at 40–41 Fő street, which used to be the property of an actual Jewish family called Blum. Hungarian author László Najmányi in his 2007 novel, The Mystery of the Blum-mansion (A Blum-ház rejtélye) describes the results of his research on the connection between Joyce and the Blum family.

THE FAMOUS CORK-LINED ROOM OF MARCEL PROUST
(reconstruction in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris)

Joyce and Proust met on May 18, 1922 but there are a number of conflicting versions of what occurred and little evidence of their assessment of each other's work. "What he envied Proust were his material circumstances: 'Proust can write; he has a comfortable place at the Etoile, floored with cork and with cork on the walls to keep it quiet. And, I, writing in this place, people coming in and out. I wonder how I can finish Ulysses." (Ellmann, pg. 509). When Proust died on November 18, 1922, Joyce attended his funeral.  Furthermore, cork had a special significance for Joyce: his father was from County Cork. Always the punster, Joyce once mounted a portrait of his father in a cork frame.

Square James Joyce

The French honor writers and artists by naming streets after them. In 1999, Joyce was recognized with this little garden near the Bibliothèque Nationale in the 13th arrondissement. It is bordered by streets named after Abel Gance, the film director, George Balanchine, the ballet master and Valéry Larbaud, the novelist and great friend of Joyce.

"The Dead" is deeply indebted to many musical compositions. The story's title is believed to refer to Thomas Moore's Irish Melodie "O Ye Dead!" in which the living and the dead sing of their envy for one another's state of being in alternating stanzas. The story itself contains a number of different dances, a piano competition piece, an aria from Bellini's I Puritani, and the haunting rendition of the folksong "The Lass of Aughrim" which serves as the catalyst for the story's epiphany. Thus the story's musical allusions are eclectic in both their style and performing forces--indeed we would expect nothing less from Joyce. No less interesting, however, are the linguistic events in this story. "The Dead" begins with the awkward and eventually aborted conversation between Gabriel Conroy and Lilly, the caretaker's daughter. This encounter is followed by Gabriel's conversation with the Irish nationalist Miss Ivors, the dinner-table conversation about music and Gabriel's own dissembling speech, his conversation with Gretta about her lost love Michael Furey, and Gabriel's own final meditation on life and love. When divided into the two realms of music and language, the narrative progression of the story might be diagrammed in the following manner:

Music	Waltz	Piano-Dance-Aria		Song
Language	Conevrsation		Discussion-Speech		Conversation-Meditaion

مجموعه داستان دوبلینی ها متشکل از 15 داستان است. اگر چه هر کدام از داستان ها به موضوعی جداگانه می پردازد اما آن چه آن ها را به هم پیوند داده و مرتبط می کند ایده و درونمایه "فلج" است. هر کدام از این داستان ها ابتدا، میانه، و پایانی دارد در حالی که از لحاظ ساختار کلی اثر نیز آن ها به گونه ای چیده شده اند که داستان های اولیه در حکم ابتدا، داستان های بعدی در حکم میانه، و داستان های آخر به منزله پایان کل اثر به شمار می روند. جویس در این مجموعه به رسوا گری روح فلج جسمی، اخلاقی، روانی، معنوی که همانا دوبلین است می پردازد. اگر چه فلج هسته مرکزی است اما مرکز اخلاقی دوبلینی ها تنها فلج نیست بلکه آشکار شدن این فلج برای قربانیان داستان ها است. آن چه نقطه اوج داستان ها را تشکیل می دهد رسیدن به خود آگاهی نسبت به این وضعیت دردناک است. پسرک داستان های "یک برخورد" و "عربی" به چنین آگاهی دست می یابند؛ رسیدن به این مرحله برای لیتل چندلر ("یک ابر کوچک") و جیمز دافی ("یک حادثه دردناک") به مراتب تلخ تر است زیرا برای زمانی طولانی به تأخیر افتاده است؛ و سرانجام خودآگاهی گابریل ("مردگان")، بغرنج ترین و تلخ ترین، که نه تنها نقطه اوج داستان بلکه نقطه اوج کل اثر نیز به شمار می رود. هنگامی که قهرمان های جویس به وضعیت خود پی می برند، ما نیز به چنین آگاهی دست یافته و خود را نا توان از رهایی از چنبره تقدیر می یابیم. دوبلین که همچون وحی بر دوبلینی ها ظاهر می شود دنیا و خودمان را نیز بر ما ظاهر می کند.

دوبلینی ها برای جویس تنها یک سانسور اخلاقی، یک پرتره دو پهلو، یا یک تصویر خیر خواهانه به شمار نمی آمد بلکه بیانیه دلایل او در جانبداری از تبعید بود. این کتاب متشکل از تصاویری است از آن چه بر سر او می آمد اگر در دوبلین می ماند. به عبارت دیگر، دوبلینی ها کلکسیونی از وحشت های خصوصی و شخصی نویسنده است. از این رو، می توان دید که بسیاری از شخصیت های این داستان ها جویس های بالقوه هستند. نام دو نفر از شخصیت های اصلی این مجموعه "جیمز" است: پدر جیمز فلین (تصور ممکنی از جویس اگر در لباس کشیشی مانده بود) و جیمز دافی (تصور ممکن دیگری از جویس اگر در دوبلین کارمند بانک می شد). مردک منحرف چشم سبز در "یک برخورد"، لینهان در "دو زن نواز"، و هاینس در "روز پیچک" هر کدام ویژگی هایی از خالق اثر را به دوش می کشند. اما تصویر اصلی جویس به عنوان یک دوبلینی رو به زوال را می توان در شخصیت گابریل کانروی در داستان "مردگان" شاهد بود که تصوری است از آن چه بر سر جویس می توانست بیاید اگر پس از ازدواج با نورا بارناکل در دوبلین مانده بود و در دانشگاه درس می داد و برای روزنامه ها نقد می نوشت. آنچه گابریل در مورد دوبلین احساس می کند احساس جویس هم هست اما از فاصله ای امن و دور. چنین فاصله ای برای زندگی و هنر جویس از واجبات به شمار می رفت.

در جواب یک نفر که گفته بود اولیس ارزش خواندن ندارد جویس این طور پاسخ می دهد:

"اگر اولیس ارزش خواندن نداشته باشد پس زندگی هم ارزش زیستن ندارد."

Ulysses. London: Published for The Egoist Press by John Rodker. The first edition printed in England appeared eight months after the Paris edition, utilizing the French plates, and was limited to 2000 copies, 1000 of which were to be sent to America. The Lilly copy includes 7 pp. of errata loosely inserted. Ulysses was seized and banned in both America and England, and did not appear in those countries until 1934 and 1936 respectively.

Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922 . First edition, one of 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper, in the original blue wrappers. The first edition of Ulysses was printed in Paris with the support of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The text was set in Dijon by Maurice Darantie, and grew by over one third in the course of correcting proofs, so that Darantie's habitual gesture became one of throwing up his hands in despair. Inevitably, the first edition was filled with small errors. Nevertheless, it remains the highlight of twentieth-century book collecting. In addition to the first 100 signed copies, there were 150 numbered copies on Arches paper, and 750 copies on handmade paper. Ulysses appeared on Joyce's 40th birthday.

(James Joyce: 6 Years Old)

John Stanislaus Joyce to His Son (James)

31 January 1931

My dear Jim. I wish you a very happy birthday and also a bright and happy New Year. I wonder do you recollect the old days in Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to take you out in the square and tell you all about the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across?

I will write to Georgio in a few days, when he returns from his honeymoon. I see by the photo that he too wears glasses? I suppose he needs [them] but if possible he should not use them. I hope Lucia’s sight is all right, give her my fond love and also to Nora. I often hear from Mr Healy, whose generous gifts I should be glad if you would also acknowledge. Again, my dear boy, may God bless you is the prayer of Your fond and loving Father.

(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

“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…

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.”

 Macintosh: The best known of these is the identity of the Man in the Macintosh, who appears as the 13th mourner at Dignam's funeral, and is mentioned again and again thruout the day. Nabokov bet it was Joyce himself, but the evidence seems stronger that it's the widower of Mrs Sinico in Joyce's story "A Painful Case" (or Mr Duffy). It is proposed, based on some worksheet notes, that Macintosh is an arsonist as well, who sets the blaze at the end of the Oxen chapter.

Symmetries: Ellmann devoted a book "Ulysses on the Liffey" to a search for symmetries in the structure of Ulysses, generally agreed to be unconvincing. But based on the evidence of Joyce's earliest plans, and his first (Linati) schema, there is a mirror symmetry in the central twelve chapters, comprising Odysseus's twelve adventures as Bloom's navigation between ethical extremes like over-religiosity (Lotus Eaters) and over-profanity (Oxen of the Sun).

Dubliners. London: Grant Richards, 1914. First edition. Grant Richards, who first agreed to publish Dubliners without having read the stories in detail, soon raised objections voiced by his printer. To these Joyce replied: "His marking of the first passage makes me think there is priestly blood in him: the scent for immoral allusions is certainly very keen here." "In no other civilized country in Europe," he wrote Richards, "is a printer allowed to open his mouth." Nevertheless, Richards decided not to publish the stories, and only later relented, when Joyce had become better known. The sales were too low for royalties. Today, the short stories in Dubliners are considered among the finest of their genre, and "The Dead" is often referred to as the best short story ever written.

Dubliners. New York: The Modern Library, 1926. First Modern Library edition. Joyce recalled in 1932 that "No less than twenty-two publishers and printers read the manuscript of Dubliners and when at last it was printed some very kind person bought out the entire edition and had it burnt in Dublin--a new and private auto-da-fé." But by 1926, following the publication of Ulysses and Joyce's world-wide fame, these interlinking stories of everyday Dublin life were already taking on the status of a classic, as reflected by their inclusion in The Modern Library, which declared: "For the reader who has never sampled Joyce, 'DUBLINERS' is an ideal introduction."

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause...

(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

The Beatles

"I Am the Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour

Call it an "urban legend" of the literary community; or perhaps just a bit of musical apocrypha, but there has been a persistent belief that John Lennon was influenced by Finnegans Wake when he penned the lyrics for "I Am the Walrus," one of the Beatles' more linguistically surreal tunes. The evidence is scanty -- it is known that Lennon was aware of Joyce, and had professed to having read a bit of the Wake after someone had remarked that his own writing was "Joycean." It is also known that Lennon was influenced by literature in general, particularly by Lewis Carroll. But the only "hard evidence" is the "goo goo g'joob" phrase from "Walrus," which is often -- and most likely mistakenly -- connected to a line from the Wake (FW 557.7: "goo goo goosth"). Is that enough to establish a real connection? Was Lennon influenced by Joyce when he wrote "I Am the Walrus"?

"I Am the Walrus"

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I'm crying.

Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.

Mister City Policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row.
See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run.
I'm crying, I'm crying.
I'm crying, I'm crying.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don't come, you get a tan
From standing in the English rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.

Expert textpert choking smokers,
Don't you thing the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty,
See how they snied.
I'm crying.

Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Alan Poe.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.
Goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob g'goo.

Silent, O Moyle
Words by Thomas Moore, to the air "My Dear Eveleen";
musical arrangement by N. Clifford Page

Liner Notes:
This Thomas Moore song from his volume of Irish Melodies figures in one of James Joyce's short stories and in Ulysses, as well as in Finnegans Wake.

Ulysses
 
There is a brief reference to the "Song of Fionnuala" in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses. Gathering in the conversations of the other men with him in Dublin's National Library, Stephen Dedalus is acutely aware of his own sense of separation, of alienation. He does not belong to their national-commercial-aesthetic coterie. At the same time, his heart is still torn over the recent death of his mother. Exiled, alone, living in a world apart from theirs, his art unheard and unappreciated by them, Stephen has a fleeting thought that neatly sums up his feelings:

Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lir's loneliest daughter.
[192:36]

Cordelia, of course, is the spurned but faithful daughter of Shakespeare's King Lear. Cordoglio is an Italian word meaning "grief" or "anguish." Finally, in the last phrase, he identifies himself with Fionnuala, the daughter of the sea king, Lir. Though transformed into a swan and doomed to hardship and wandering far from her homeland, she was gifted with both human speech and the power of song.

Interestingly, the National Library, where this scene occurs, is situated on Kildare street — the same street where Lenehan and Corley in Dubliners heard the harpist playing "Silent, O Moyle."

This line illustrates in a nutshell less the originality than the genius and sheer efficiency of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique (or monologue intérieur, a method of narrative which was, as a matter of fact, first exploited by the French author M. Edouard Dujardin in his tale Les Lauriers Sont Coupés, published in 1887). The Bard has been the main topic of conversation in the library, which conjures up the first reference. The name of Shakespeare's character Cordelia suggests the similar-sounding word cordoglio; and it further elicits the allusion to Moore's song by tying together the linguistically related names of "Lear" and "Lir" as well as the parallels in their stories.

The sequence of references reveals with exquisite exactitude, and in a manner that pages of descriptive exposition could never succeed in doing, both Stephen's mood and his individual mode of thinking.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Finnegans Wake

There is at least one oblique reference to "Silent, O Moyle" in chapter III.3:

...and I wound around my swanchen's neckplace a school of shells of moyles marine to swing their saysangs in her silents...
[548:32-34]

If he had not become a writer, there is a very good chance that James Joyce would still have made a name for himself by pursuing a career as a vocal performer. In 1904 he even shared the stage with the great opera singer and recital artist, John McCormack; and later on in life, after he had established himself as an author, he tirelessly promoted the singing career of his fellow Irishman and tenor, John Sullivan.

The close relationship between James Joyce and music has long been recognized by his readers, critics, and biographers. Joyce, like his father, was both an excellent singer (with a sweet tenor voice) and an accomplished pianist with an encyclopedic mastery of music of every type and genre, rivaling his vast knowledge of world literature. As a writer, he nevertheless incorporated music into all his works in increasingly complex ways, especially in Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

Beside helping our understanding of Joyce, studying his use of music is a wonderfully entertaining way to make the works more immediate and accessible.

Joyce was acquainted with music of all sorts, from grand opera to bawdy street ballads, and he interspersed countless allusions to these works throughout the body of his writings. What has long been rare in Joycean scholarship, however, is the opportunity to hear these songs performed in an historically accurate style that would be familiar to Joyce, and as his contemporaries would have heard them. The selections on the recording, recently released by Sunphone Records, are among the best known in the Joyce canon...

If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programmes, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millenium. And here, too, we will find the love that reanimates this debris . . . Through notes that finally become tuneable to our ears, we hear James Joyce uttering his resilient, all-enjoying, all-animating 'Yes', the Yes of things to come, a Yes from beyond every zone of disillusionment, such as few have had the heart to utter.

--Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnagans Wake

(Lucia Joyce. Photograph by Berenice Abbott. Lucia, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic by Jung, was an inspiration for Milly Bloom in Ulysses and Issy in Finnegans Wake.)

 
When Samuel Beckett died in 1989, a striking snapshot of a feral woman dancing, clad from head to toe in silver fish scales, was found among his papers. Beckett had kept this memento of his affair with James Joyce's turbulent daughter, Lucia, for more than 60 years. To her father, Lucia was the "wonder wild," his dark muse, who spent much of her adolescence locked with him in a room while he wrote "Finnegans Wake," his final novel. "Whatever spark or gift I possess," Joyce wrote in 1934, "it has been transmitted to Lucia and kindled a fire in her brain." But the rest of the world saw her differently; in the history of 20th-century literature, Lucia is portrayed as a troublesome blight on the Joyce family, an eccentric, mentally unstable woman in the mold of Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath.

James Joyce's Women (1985)

1985, Color

Directed by Michael Pearce
Cinemotography by John Metcalfe
Music by Arthur Keating, Vincent Kilduff & Garrett O'Conner

Cast (in order of credits)

Fionnula Flanagan . . . Nora Joyce, Gertie MacDowell, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Main Washerwoman, & Molly Bloom.
Chris O'Neill . . . James Joyce
James E. O'Grady . . .The Interviewer
Tony Lyons . . . Leopold Bloom
Paddy Dawson . . . Stannie Joyce
Martin Dempsey . . . Joyce's father
Gerald Fitzmahony . . . The Dublin Gossips
Joseph Taylor . . . Dubliner
Rebecca Wilkinson . . .Washerwoman
Gladys Sheehan . . . Washerwoman
Gabrielle Keenan . . . Cissy Caffrey
Michele O'Connor . . . Edy Boardman

All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.
(301.20-22)

End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
(628.13 to 3.3)

…There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist acts forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others…

An ardent admirer of Joyce, this blind Argentine mentions him several times in his writings, and was one of the first Spanish-language reviewers of Ulysses. He’s also written two poems about James Joyce: “James Joyce,” and “Invocation to Joyce.” Here are some of the more interesting references to Joyce from some of his essays and lectures.

 
Yeats, Rilke and Eliot have written verses more memorable than those of Valery; Joyce and Stefan George have effected more profound modifications in their instrument (perhaps French is less modifiable than English and German); but behind the work of these eminent artificers there is no personality comparable to Valery’s.
– Essay: “Valery as Symbol”

I believed, and still believe, that some twenty-five hundred years ago there was a prince of Nepal named Siddhartha or Gautama who became the Buddha, the Enlightened or Awakened One – as opposed to the rest of us who are sleeping or are dreaming this great dream that is life. I remember that line of Joyce: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Well, Siddhartha, at age thirty, woke up and became the Buddha.
– 1977 Lecture: “Buddhism”

Let us recall another example, one more famous than Groussac. In James Joyce we are also given a twofold work. We have these two vast and – why not say it? – unreadable novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But that is only half of his work (which also includes beautiful poems and the admirable Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). The other half, and perhaps the most redeeming aspect (as they now say) is the fact that he took on the almost infinite English language. That language – which is statistically larger than all the others and offers so many possibilities for the writer, particularly in its concrete verbs – was not enough for him. Joyce, an Irishman, recalled that Dublin had been founded by Danish Vikings. He studied Norwegian – he wrote a letter to Ibsen in Norwegian – and then he studied Greek, Latin . . . He knew all the languages, and he wrote in a language invented by himself, difficult to understand but marked by a strange music. Joyce brought a new music to English. And he said, valorously (and mendaciously) that “of all the things that have happened to me, I think that the least important was having been blind.” Part of his vast work was executed in darkness: polishing the sentences in his memory, working at times for a whole day on a single phrase, and then writing it and correcting it. All in the midst of blindness or periods of blindness.
– 1977 Lecture: “Blindness”

Woody Allen

From the physical comedy of Bananas to the neurotic satire of Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen has made a career of making poignant films that combine slapstick, wry intellectual humor, and painful insight into the daily perils of modern life. Though may of his films are touched by an almost Romantic nostalgia, more then a few are stylistically quite postmodern, serving up witty reflections about art, celebrity, memory, and filmmaking itself.
Though none of his movies show any serious Joycean influence, Woody Allen has name-dropped Mr. Joyce a few times, as he has with numerous other “high-brow” authors.

Manhattan (1979)
Chris Lockhart writes: “In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, there is a line similar to ‘I wouldn’t say your novel is too difficult, I’m just saying it makes Finnegans Wake look like an Airplane movie.’”

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Woody Allen’s character jokingly confesses that he cribbed his love letters from James Joyce, which is “why there’s so much about Dublin in them.”

 Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater is a promising young American with several wonderful and offbeat films to his credit. Two of these have clear Joycean influences; while the amazing Waking Life has an extended discussion of Philip K. Dick.

Slacker (1991)
A hilarious and extremely clever cult film, Slacker is a low budget masterpiece. Set at a Texas University, it has absolutely no plot. Essentially, a roving camera plays the part of an omniscient eye, following one person until he or she encounters another; the camera then tracks this other person as he or she moves on until it again breaks off and follows the events of a new individual or group of people. A whole web of interactions soon emerges, showing the inter-relatedness of everything, even seemingly random things. All types of people are captured: conspiracy nuts, arguing couples, party-goers, Brian Eno-freaks, criminals, saints . . . and a few who seem to be borderline insane. The camera eye also begins to undergo changes as well, the point of view occasionally leaping into other cameras....
As I was watching this film for the first time, I couldn’t help thinking to myself that it was highly reminiscent of the “Wandering Rocks” episode in Ulysses, where Joyce omnisciently tracks all his characters through Dublin. And then, lo and behold, in the middle of the movie my suspicions of Joyce influence were confirmed – one character reads aloud from Ulysses as he encourages his friend to toss the detritus of a broken relationship off a bridge.

Before Sunrise (1995)
Another hint that Linklater is a Joyce fan was brought up by J. LeRoy Boison, who pointed out that Before Sunrise is a love story that takes place entirely on one day – June 16, known to Ulysses fans as “Bloomsday.”