James Joyce Encyclopedia

Este arquivo pode e talvez deva mesmo ser eliminado do projeto se for executado

Declan Kiberd

Em que pese o pedigree e o peso de assinar a introdução-explicação da Bodley Head-Penguin e de uma tradução brasileira:

Declan Kiberd was bom in Eccles Street, Dublin, ia 1951. He graduated from Trinity Coliege before going out to take a doctorate at Oxford University. His publications include Synge and the Irish Langusage (1979), Anglo-lrish Anitudes (1984) and Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985). He has lectured in over fifteen countries and written many articles and television scripts ou the literature and politics of Ireland. A former director of the Yeats International Summer School, he has taught for more than a decade at University College Dublin. He is married, with two daughters and a son.

Seamus Deane is General Editor for the works of James Joyce in Penguin. Heis Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Não consigo deixar de pensar sobre coisas que ele colocou lá e que trago para questionamento:

Ele abre com a famosa resposta de Joyce sobre o que ele teria feito na primeira guerra, elaborando sobre a guerra sem chegar a nada. A primeira guerra foi o fim de uma era, aliás muito bem analisada por John Kenneth Galbraith na sua era da incerteza.

Ele contextualiza a resposta de Joyce na peça Travesties de Tom Stoppard, como piada brilhante, sem mencionar que Joyce had an angry disagreement after the play, which led to legal action and accusations of slander by Joyce. The dispute was settled with the judge deciding in favour of both disputants on different counts. Joyce later parodied Carr, and the English Consul General in Zürich at that time, A. Percy Bennett, as two minor characters in Ulysses, with Carr being portrayed as a drunken, obscene soldier in the "Circe" episode. This was a very sad time for him.

Em x - 10 (A revisão da Penguin não descobriu ainda que numeros romanos são em maiúsculas) ele elabora sobre a noção que Joyce tem do heroismo ser uma mentira e não ha substituto para a paixão individual, que nada mais é do que o que nos mantém vivos, a força da libido do Freud ligando com machismo (triste...) da conquista sexual, militarismo, e ainda por cima força uma idéia sobre a representatividade da figura de "deus" aleijado, culminando com uma alocação sobre Leopold Bloom que esta completamente equivocada.

Ele continua com a menção da reação de Joyce contra o culto de Cuchulainn, que no contexto de uma "metafísica" Joyceana, é muito menos importante que a reencarnação (metempsicose). Alias, uma hora os Irlandeses são a raça mais atrasada da Europa, outra oura são uma raça gentil... xi e xii.

O não alinhamento político de Joyce e a imperdoável não aceitação ou não ligar, que sugere desperezo por comunismo e socialismo, não passa na goela da comunidade intelectual politicamente correta...

Não sei de onde ele tirou, e eu transcrevo: "Joyce believed that a writer's duty might be to insult rather than to flatter national vanity" xiii

A Irlanda entrou no mapa do ideario intelectual europeu e mundial pelas mãos de Joyce... Onde fica: "I go to encounter for the Millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race… Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."

Em xv, ele afirma que Joyce confidenciou a Frank Budgen: "Jesus was a bachelor and never lived witha woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it" Com a obervação no paragrafo anterior que ele não foi nem Fausto, quke seria um campeão sexual e Jesus um celibatario.

Tipo da redação que faz vibrar incautos que desconhecem os dois personagens e o que está por trás deles...

Em xvii ele informa que a elite intelecutual russa teria dispensado Joyce por que era de uma obscuridade elitista e ao juntar com o banimento ocorrido nos Estados Unidos. Confunde o argumento, pois Ulysses já entrava nos EUA na década de 20 e foi entrar na União Soviética em 1989.

Ele tenta, em xvii minimizar o fato de que Joyce não passa na goela do establishment Irlandês. Aliás, esta introdução é um cavalo de troia, porque tenta reconciliar estes opostos que é o incômodo que os irlandeses sentem ao serem dissecados por Joyce e a acolhida que o mundo deu a isto.

Em xviii ele cita uma crítica de DH Lawrence, outro banido famoso, sem entrar no mérito que daria uma discussão fantástica: DH Lawrence entra na questão do erotismo feminino e construiu uma obra que é erótica para mulheres. Joyce descreve o erotismo do personagem homem sendo excitado, porém não consegue fazer o que DH Lawrence fez para mulheres para os homens: Algo erótico...

De James Joyce for Ordinary Blokes?, extraio, simplifico, junto e comento:

Nesta mesma página, ele cita Virginia Wolf sem lembrar que Virginia Woolf, dismissed Ulysses as "a mis-fire." In a diary entry for September 6, 1922, she wrote: "The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious but in the literary sense." Ou, pior, Yet, while the Bloomsbury Cult, whose principal deity is Woolf, flourishes, it lacks the authority of the Church of Joyce, whose sacred text is Ulysses. Its hunters—happy or hapless, deconstructionists, feminists, postcolonialists, queer theorists, and others—tend to belong to the species homo joyceanus, which rarely mates with other modernists.

Aliás, Steven G.Kellmann faz um comentário que talvez explique Kiberd: "My university employs numerous specialists in modern literature, and, though they frequently teach Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and insist on keeping Ulysses on the M.A. required-reading list, none to my knowledge has taught Ulysses since the departure of our sole Joycean, a decade ago."

Será que Kiberd não está tentando evitar isto e manter o culto de Joyce vivo? De uma forma, digamos falaciosa?

Alias, Prof. Kelmann tambem sente isto:

"In Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, September), Declan Kiberd pronounces Ulysses "modernism's greatest masterpiece." But, though the author is a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, he aims to rescue the novel from academic captivity. The paradox that Kiberd begins with and, like Odysseus returning to Penelope, comes back to at the end is that "a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them." He provides insightful commentary on how Ulysses recapitulates and transcends The Odyssey, the Bible, The Divine Comedy, and Hamlet, but he is most intent on demonstrating that Joyce's book is positively Whitmanesque, an enduring epic of the people and for the people. Ulysses, he proclaims, is "an extended hymn to the dignity of everyday living," best appreciated by those who do that living.

In 18 chapters, with gerundive titles such as "Waking," "Learning," "Eating," and "Ogling," Kiberd walks his reader through the 18 episodes of the novel, an account of Stephen Dedalus's and Leopold Bloom's perambulations through 1904 Dublin. He is especially informative about the Irish context of a work that is set in the provincial capital a couple of generations after the famine and after English supplanted Gaelic as the lingua franca, koine of the realm, in occupied Éire. And he has much to say about how a dialectic of animus and anima is embodied in Leopold Bloom's androgyny. But what distinguishes this study from the bulging midrash on Joyce's canon is Kiberd's central contention that Ulysses is the magnum opus of populism. Not only does Joyce lavish attention on the unexceptional activities—breakfasts and bowel movements—of unexceptional characters, but, Kiberd argues, common folk not unlike Leopold and Molly Bloom, Gerty MacDowell, and Ned Lambert, rather than credentialed intellectuals, are the novel's ideal readers. "The book was written to be enjoyed by ordinary men and women," he maintains. Nevertheless, even Nora Barnacle, the former chambermaid whom Joyce cherished precisely because she was not an intellectual, pronounced Ulysses "dirty" and asked her husband, "Why can't you write sensible books that people can understand?"

Em xxvi ele literalmente chuta o balde, quando, no primeiro paragrafo sai da discussão da validade de se lutar, con violencia por algo, para introduzir a questão do papel da mulher quando ao pecado, levantando dúvidas quanto à virtude das mulheres pelas considerações feitas em Cyclops...

Aliás, esta e outras misturas com literatura convencional, são muito bem criticadas pelo Prof. Kelmann:

"According to Haines, a visiting Englishman in Ulysses who disparages Stephen Dedalus's theory of Hamlet, "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance." The same could be said of Joyce, who told his French translator, Jacques Benoîst-Méchin: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality." According to the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, Ulysses has generated 2,656 scholarly studies. By contrast, the MLA lists only 1,477 entries for Marcel Proust's masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, and only 414 entries for Mrs. Dalloway, whose author, Virginia Woolf, dismissed Ulysses as "a mis-fire." In a diary entry for September 6, 1922, she wrote: "The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious but in the literary sense."

Yet, while the Bloomsbury Cult, whose principal deity is Woolf, flourishes, it lacks the authority of the Church of Joyce, whose sacred text is Ulysses. Its hunters—happy or hapless, deconstructionists, feminists, postcolonialists, queer theorists, and others—tend to belong to the species homo joyceanus, which rarely mates with other modernists. My university employs numerous specialists in modern literature, and, though they frequently teach Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and insist on keeping Ulysses on the M.A. required-reading list, none to my knowledge has taught Ulysses since the departure of our sole Joycean, a decade ago.

In Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, September), Declan Kiberd pronounces Ulysses "modernism's greatest masterpiece." But, though the author is a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, he aims to rescue the novel from academic captivity. The paradox that Kiberd begins with and, like Odysseus returning to Penelope, comes back to at the end is that "a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them." He provides insightful commentary on how Ulysses recapitulates and transcends The Odyssey, the Bible, The Divine Comedy, and Hamlet, but he is most intent on demonstrating that Joyce's book is positively Whitmanesque, an enduring epic of the people and for the people. Ulysses, he proclaims, is "an extended hymn to the dignity of everyday living," best appreciated by those who do that living.

Late in the novel, we are told that Leopold Bloom "had applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life." Reading Ulysses as a "book of wisdom," and contending that its author "insisted on the use-value of art," Kiberd adopts the same approach to Joyce himself. In doing so, he makes common cause with other recent books that attempt to apply literary classics to everyday behavior, from boardroom to bedroom. They include Robert A. Brawer's Fictions of Business: Insights on Management From Great Literature (John Wiley, 1998) and Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.'s Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). In How Proust Can Change Your Life (Pantheon Books, 1997), Alain de Botton interprets the French master's seven volumes as a self-help manual. And several writers attempt to draw practical tips from Shakespeare, prince of the literary pantheon. Among them are John O. Whitney and Tina Packer in Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership and Management (Simon & Schuster, 2001); Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman in Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage (Hyperion-Talk-Miramax, 1999); Paul Corrigan in Shakespeare on Management (Kogan Page, 1999); and Jay M. Shafritz in Shakespeare on Management: Wise Business Counsel from the Bard (HarperBusiness, 1999).

Though Kiberd neglects to point out that Ulysses instructs us in how to cook pork kidneys and fill out racing forms, he does insist that "this is a book with much to teach us about the world—advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time; how the language of the body is often more eloquent than any words; how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke; how to purge sexual relations of all notions of ownership; or how the way a person approaches food can explain who they really are."

Joyce himself claimed otherwise. In 1922 he complained to a fellow novelist, Djuna Barnes: "The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it." Joyce was not entirely serious about that disclaimer, any more than Mark Twain was when he posted his famous warning at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Nevertheless, such persons need to proceed with caution.

Ulysses is indeed a triumph of what Northrop Frye called "the low mimetic mode"; it elevates plebeian characters and banal actions to artistic consideration and, celebrating them, performs what Kiberd, in an aptly Catholic metaphor, calls "the sacrament of everyday life." But his exhortation that "it is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people" is not in itself enough to overcome the paradox that the novel is read not by "real people," but only by students and scholars. Real men may or may not eat quiche, but the "real people" Kiberd seems to have in mind rarely, according to surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts, read any books, and when they do, the authors are more likely to be Stephen King, James Patterson, or Danielle Steel than James Joyce.

Moreover, despite the admirable lucidity of his own style, devoid of preening jargon and turgid syntax, Kiberd's erudite book—though issued by a trade publisher, W.W. Norton, and not a university press—is not likely to be read by the "real people" he sentimentalizes and patronizes. "Modern living," he complains, "has been devalued by gloomy intellectuals who failed to appreciate just how intelligent, cheerful, and resourceful people were in their daily lives." Henry David Thoreau's claim that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation might be excessively gloomy, but nostalgie de la boue, the impulse to romanticize the commonplace, is the most insidious form of snobbery. It does not in any case explain why the masses of intelligent, cheerful, and resourceful people are not reading Ulysses.

No amount of populist pep talk can camouflage the fact that Ulysses is a demanding book. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce told Max Eastman, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." Few readers are willing to meet that demand. Though "elite" has become one of the most damaging epithets in the arsenal of political invective, it is best to admit that Joyce's work—caveat for the masses—resists easy access. Membership in the self-selecting community that responds to Joyce's challenge is not a function of class, wealth, or race, but rather of stubborn ardor. Its readers are convinced of a correlation between arduousness of effort and aesthetic pleasure.

Furthermore, the difficulties of reading Ulysses are integral to its art; the experience of negotiating and assimilating its unexpected words and sentences is more important than any practical lesson a well-meaning guide might draw from it for us. While packaging Joyce as a universal mentor, Kiberd also sums up what we need to take from Homer's epic: "The wisdom to be gleaned from the Odyssey is clear enough: that there is nothing better in life than when a man and woman live in harmony and that such happiness, though felt intensely by the couple themselves, can never be fully described."

But life is short and art is long, and if that's all there is, why not just settle for Kiberd's summary instead of struggling through more than 12,000 lines of Homer's challenging verse? Disguised as praise, books that offer practical uses for literary classics are in fact acts of iconoclastic arrogance. Proclaiming their fealty to the ordinary, they are driven by impatience with—even contempt for—the actual experience of reading extraordinary works."

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, author of "Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth" (W.W. Norton, 2005), and editor of a new edition of M.E. Ravage's "An American in the Making" (Rutgers, 2009).

E não para ai... em xxx ele interpreta maldosamente a declaração de Elliot feita no The Dial em 1923 como desculpa por fazer imitação... T S Elliot simplesmente estava apontando o óbvio, que foi o que o Joseph Campbell fez e modernamente não apenas escritores como grandes diretores estão usando este método posto às claras por Campbel e pode ser sumarizado assim<

Em xxxiii ele mistura estação na distinção entre mito e ficção, usando argumentação do critico Frank Kermode, afirmando que, cf Kermode, "ficções podem degenerar em mitos, enquanto não forem conscientmente consideradas ficção.. Neste sentido, anti semitismo é uma ficção degenerada, um mito e Rei Lear é uma ficção". Por extensão, poderia ser dito que Ulysses é uma ficção construida sobre as estruturas de um mito.

Os mitos, gregos, romanos, ou o que seja, não são degenarações de ficções... são expressão do inconsciente na forma como o momento e a cultura de quem os expressa o fez... Neste sentido, o Bloomsday é efeit do mito Ulysses, ou melhor, do mito James Joyce...

Em xxxvii, primeiro paragrafo: "Joyce's distrust of written English might have been predicted of a man who grew up in an essentially oral culture, but it had its source in his sense of trauma at the loss, in most parts of Ireland through the nineteenth century, of the native language" e cita uma passagem do Portrait

O que esta em jogo ai é a galinha que os africanos viram no filme que o McLuhan cita na Galaxia de Gutenberg... ou seja, a diferença entre um tipo de cultura e outra, nao contra a lingua inglesa escrita... Todas as considerações que ele faz posteriormente baseado neste skuposto ódio, são equivocadas...

Em xlii - 42, ele conta a piada que Joyce erdera um dia na ordem das palavras de duas sentenças... Claro, é impossivel expressar, com duas, ou n palavras, não importando a ordem o que ocorre, como ele queria descrever, Bloom's mingled feelings of awe and lechery as he contemplated female underclothing in the milliner's window...

Que aliás, é coroado com o desenho em xliii - 43 onde ele demonstra a "sentença inacabada" que o livro seria... Soa bem, mas o que quer dizer isto?

De xlix - 49 a 79, a analise dos personagens é um desastre...

Declan Kiberd não somente localiza tudo que Stuart Gilbert nega, ainda por cima descobre homossexualide (masculina e feminina), bissexualidade, androginia e misoginia! Dá desânimo e cansaço e me recuso a analisar, tanta besteira. Remeto o leitor ou leitora para a noção de animus e anima da parte de quem se não inventou, trouxe para o conhecimento humano moderno, Carl Jung, que está dentro do artigo acima< sobre relações psicológicas no casamento em vermelho.