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Sep. 25th, 2012 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBefore the other thing I was coming to the computer to write about The Dead. What a fantastic story! And somehow makes itself inevitable, so central a story that it feels like someone else would have had to have written it if Joyce didn't, which is something you don't often feel in literature after, say, Chekhov or late Tolstoy. Excellent things are oblique and win us over, invite us somewhere new, they're not from the center like this is anymore.
Though it did remind me a lot of Certified Copy, which I saw recently and was floored by. I don't know anything about Kiarostami, so am ignorant what connection there might be - perhaps they just converge here for a spell.
The immense turn clearly gets into some Williams plays, and is nearly duplicated in Streetcar in Blanche's backstory. And I again don't know enough to say this, but Citizen Kane may be picking up on its resonances.
Where it got those resonances itself I think I understand a bit better. The Eve of St Agnes contributes the party/winter/bower triad and the age dynamic, some of which Romeo and Juliet gave it. But the main thing happening here is Keats the man (Bright Star era) getting conflated with Shelley as both poet and person as symbols of young, death-embracing passion. This isn't to diminish the awesome universality of the story's last paragraphs - it's just that when Joyce imagines a representative person who loved and died that's what he puts together, that's the sort of figure he has in him. I think this may even explain the story's preoccupation with Browning, so much of whose poetry (Andrea del Sarto being most relevant here) tells the story of his own failure to follow the Shelleyan path - except as a sort of belated parody - and his strained hope that there will somehow be posthumous consolation. Joyce's ending nixes that desperate wish, and that's part of why it's so much more consoling. Silver snow in the dark falling slowly into the sea.
***
Williams probably picks up on this in Streetcar by making Alan Grey basically Hart Crane, our American Keats-Shelley composite.
Young Joyce: "In my history of literature I have given the highest palms to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley."
***
My entry from a few years ago with quotes explaining the Shelley/Protestant Cemetery connection:
Joyce:
His notes to Exiles (under Nora's initials):
13 Nov. 1913
Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him.
Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body.
She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence.
From somebody on the web:
'The Dead' was written in Rome, a city in which the presence of the dead and of the past is uniquely overpowering. Joyce visited Shelley's tomb there with Nora, who 'responded with a string of morbid romantic associations that moved him deeply' (Maddox, 75). These concerned her dead sweetheart, the model for Michael Furey in 'The Dead'.
There aren't enough exclamation points. Right there that moment happened. And then the play too. Ibsen's horns and now this.
Though it did remind me a lot of Certified Copy, which I saw recently and was floored by. I don't know anything about Kiarostami, so am ignorant what connection there might be - perhaps they just converge here for a spell.
The immense turn clearly gets into some Williams plays, and is nearly duplicated in Streetcar in Blanche's backstory. And I again don't know enough to say this, but Citizen Kane may be picking up on its resonances.
Where it got those resonances itself I think I understand a bit better. The Eve of St Agnes contributes the party/winter/bower triad and the age dynamic, some of which Romeo and Juliet gave it. But the main thing happening here is Keats the man (Bright Star era) getting conflated with Shelley as both poet and person as symbols of young, death-embracing passion. This isn't to diminish the awesome universality of the story's last paragraphs - it's just that when Joyce imagines a representative person who loved and died that's what he puts together, that's the sort of figure he has in him. I think this may even explain the story's preoccupation with Browning, so much of whose poetry (Andrea del Sarto being most relevant here) tells the story of his own failure to follow the Shelleyan path - except as a sort of belated parody - and his strained hope that there will somehow be posthumous consolation. Joyce's ending nixes that desperate wish, and that's part of why it's so much more consoling. Silver snow in the dark falling slowly into the sea.
***
Williams probably picks up on this in Streetcar by making Alan Grey basically Hart Crane, our American Keats-Shelley composite.
Young Joyce: "In my history of literature I have given the highest palms to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley."
***
My entry from a few years ago with quotes explaining the Shelley/Protestant Cemetery connection:
Joyce:
His notes to Exiles (under Nora's initials):
13 Nov. 1913
Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him.
Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body.
She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence.
From somebody on the web:
'The Dead' was written in Rome, a city in which the presence of the dead and of the past is uniquely overpowering. Joyce visited Shelley's tomb there with Nora, who 'responded with a string of morbid romantic associations that moved him deeply' (Maddox, 75). These concerned her dead sweetheart, the model for Michael Furey in 'The Dead'.
There aren't enough exclamation points. Right there that moment happened. And then the play too. Ibsen's horns and now this.
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Date: 2012-09-25 06:38 pm (UTC)