To esteemed Eds: the loss of correctly typed Greek letters, replaced by “?????” in some exchanges, seems random? Do we have any control?
Jansy: Joyce himself assigned Homeric themes/names to each chapter/episode of Ulysses, later adapted/refined by Gilbert & Gorman with Joyce’s approval. So it’s plain daft to deny many intended parallels with Homer’s epic. But there’s NO contradiction here with Nabokov warning us not to over-interpret Joyce’s novel in terms of Greek mythology. For each parallel there are stark anti-parallels! The three main characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus have such obvious, grotesque surface contradictions with Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope and Telemachus as to be missed only by those entirely lacking in humour (Irish or sober!). Sex-starved, city-bound Leopold! Unfaithful Molly! Anti-fatherland Stephen!
You misread my rhetorical query. It’s a well-aired point in Joycean scholarship* (and surely familiar to Nabokov, my favourite analyst of Ulysses) that Joyce was enamoured of Oolissays (his Irish-comic pronunciation) from an early age, bowled over by Charles Lamb’s version for childers-everywhere (Adventures of Ulysses, 1808, a sequel to his Tales from Shakespeare), and writing a school essay on Ulysses, as his “favourite hero.” Joyce later told Frank Bugden that Ulysses was “the only all-round character in literature.” His original title for Dubliners was Ulysses in Dublin.
PS: Jansy: to embellish the real Marat allusions with his “belief” in phlogiston is, as we say, a bit of stretch. It was the prevailing theory of combustion for about a 100 years, even surviving after experiments by Boyle, Lavoisier and others supported the rival “oxygen” theory. We have, for example, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, a contemporary French politician-chemist defending phlogiston well after Marat’s murder in 1793. It’s highly likely that Alexey can conjure up diverting connections between Guyton de Morveau and any number of Nabokov’s texts. Revisiting Ulysses, one spots the amazing link from Morveau to the snot-green sea.
* James Hefferman’s audio lectures on Ulysses from the Teacher’s Company have the added attraction of Dublin dialect and pub songs.
On 16/02/2010 23:25, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
A. Sklyarenko:Having no Greek, I'm afraid that my explanations concerning phtoros...Fluorine is extremely poisonous.
Stan K-Bootle [to Alexey: perhaps ?????? means/meant “decay” and “demolition” and “destruction!”...James Joyce and Nabokov seem to have suffered a similar lack of Greek in their schooling. It explains, they say, why Joyce’s masterwork is called Ulysses rather than Odysseus?
JM: There seems to be no justified reason to jumble "Torf/Fort/Tfor/Trof." Madame Trofim Fartukoff belongs, rather, to the lineage of "pets" (another sort of gases). Her her native town is associated not only to decay but to "torf's" energetic potencial.
Butterfly-collector and would be scientist, Marat, appears not only in Pale Fire but indirectly in Ada*. He was one of the believers in the "phlogiston." (The phlogiston, from the Ancient Greek φλογιστόν phlŏgistón "burning up", from φλόξ phlóx "fire," is a defunct scientific theory that posited the existence of a fire-like element called "phlogoism" that was contained within combustible bodies, and released during combustion.), another combustible item ...
Why would Joyce have named his novel "Ulysses" instead of Odysseus? Nabokov, all set against a "mythological reading" of Joyce's novel, might have chuckled at Stan's query ...
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* Charlotte Corday/Marat in Ada, and Marat's bath in PF were already themes under discussion in Nab-L
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