Friday, March 7, 2008
Defense
I have a lot of homework this weekend, and so I won't be able to write very much today. I do want to say that I've changed my opinion on Leopold-- I feel that in one of my other postings I berated him for his self-satisfaction. After reading this chapter, I can better understand him. Perhaps his emphasis on sensation and dismissal of the emotionally provoking is a mechanism of comforting himself so that he is able to confront the constant hostility he faces with grace.
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2 comments:
This is a terrific journal - very journal-like, and I read it with pleasure. You have a lively and engaging voice here. I am reading, as you may guess, not just to make evaluations, but to hunt for paper ideas and direct your reading a little. It may seem premature to look for paper ideas, but in a sense you are just picking a starting point. Ulysses is such a whole that any paper - even the classic "dogs in Joyce" paper - will end up engaging with the overriding themes of the book. That's something you don't do too much here - engage with the classic themes: waste land, dead society, sexuality, loss of the sacred, loss of the paternal bond, loss of the spirit, meaninglessness of language... Joyce is very on board with Eliot here.
What you do engage with a lot is the theme of gender and familial sexuality. You can pursue something related to this. You'd need to narrow it; there's much written about "women and Joyce," and, in my opinion, it is a complex subject. I don't feel Joyce can be stuck with a moral label here. You also discuss "Lycidas" - Milton may have been thinking of the poem you mention, but the name was also sort of a standard pastoral/shepherd name. There is a lot of crossover between that poem and this book, and I wonder if anyone has done it (probably). Anyway, you could: drowning, Christ, paganism & Christianity, persistence of life after death, the treacherousness of being young... The elegiac mode.
Interesting that you say Bloom needs a defense mechanism to the hostility he's "constantly facing." It seems like Bloom doesn't face open hostility, he faces general apathy and masked hostility. He's an outsider, but not hated. His attempts at friendliness aren't reciprocated, he's never "one of the guys". In a way, realizing that must be more difficult than facing hostility. So maybe Bloom's problems (he's a de facto outcast, his wife cheats on him) are met with a kind of blase face and disconnect to reality.
If that makes sense... =)
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