Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
“Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Summary
Ulysses was serialized by episode in The Egoist and The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. Significantly, Virginia Woolf launched a number of short experimental efforts of her own while reading these episodes, with delight and some exasperation, as they appeared. She is famous, too, for noting well in a TLS article of April 1919, revised as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader (first series of 1925), how James Joyce had departed from contemporary narratives by Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. Joyce showed how to look at life in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was to look at the mind, and most notably she held that this was true in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses. Woolf made reading notes on the early episodes (“Hades” was number 6), as one reads Brenda Silver's brief descriptions of those notes (155–57), wherein Woolf went only as far as commenting on the first seven episodes of Ulysses (from “Telemachus” through “Aeolus”) as they appeared in the Little Review from March to October of 1918. In viewing the notes themselves, one finds that they often reflect the remarks that Woolf published in her TLS article. The notes are inscribed in Reading Notebook XXXI, labeled by Woolf “Modern Novels (Joyce),” Holograph M91 in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and digital facsimiles are now available for viewing in Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf.
Because of this hard evidence, we may conclude that Woolf read carefully to that precise point in Ulysses for her essay. With this textual “fragment” before her, she “hazarded rather than affirmed” a “theory…as to Mr. Joyce's intention,” finding him “spiritual” (as opposed to the “materialists” just cited); as a writer, he was one
to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame that flashes its messages through the brain,…disregard[ing]…whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of the signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.
(CR1 151)- Type
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- Information
- Writing Modern Ireland , pp. 229 - 236Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015