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The "Scylla & Charybdis" episode takes place in the The National Library of Ireland, on Kildare Street. The Library was a favorite hangout of Joyce and his friends. This PC mentions: "Besides extensive library, contains magnificent reading-room of horseshoe shape." A tourist pamphlet from 1900 states: "Open daily 10am to 10pm. To this Library the public are allowed the fullest access." |
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"Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:
- And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister? A great poet" (U9.1) |
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"on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life." (U9.3) |
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"-Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death." (U9.16)
In French, a 'Vérité de la Palisse' (or 'La Palissade') is a self-evident truth, as in the following verse: "Monsieur de la Palisse is dead, he died before Pavie, Fifteen minutes before his death, he was still quite alive. He was by sorry fate wounded by a cruel hand Since he died of it, we fear the wound was a mortal one." |
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This postcard explains the origin of the expression. Jacques de la Palice or la Palisse (1470-1525) was a French nobleman and military officer. In 1511, he received the title of Grand Master of France. As a Marshal under Francis I, he fought against Italian armies, and died during the battle of Pavia. His soldiers composed a song in his honor, which said "hélas, s'il n'était pas mort, il ferait encore envie" ("Alas, if he wasn't dead, he would still be envied"). That line, misread as "il serait encore en vie", inspired a burlesque song by Bernard de la Monnoye, who replaced it by "Un quart d'heure avant sa mort, il était encore en vie." |
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"- Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder's gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan he calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly's smile." (U9.18) |
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"Paradise Lost" (U9.19) |
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"- Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
- All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex." (U9.43) |
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"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas." (U9:49)
This painting is called 'Les Licornes' (The Unicorns). From Wikipedia: Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was a French Symbolist painter. He was born and died in Paris. Moreau's main focus was the illustration of Christian and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas rather than visual images, his images appealed to the imagination of some Symbolist writers and artists, who saw him as the precursor to their movement. His first painting was a Pieta which is now located in the cathedral at Angoulême. He showed 'A Scene from the Song of Songs' and 'Death of Darius' in the Salon of 1853. In 1853 he contributed 'Athenians with the Minotaur' and 'Moses putting off his Sandals within Sight of the Promised Land' to the Great Exhibition. |
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"The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas." (U9.50)
This painting is 'Prometheus.' 'Oedipus and the Sphinx,' one of Moreau's first symbolist paintings was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. In 1891, Moreau became professor at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris, and counted among his many students the fauvist painters Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. He is buried in Paris at the Cimetierre de Montmartre. Over his lifetime Moreau created over 8000 paintings, watercolors and drawings, many of which are now in the Musée Gustave Moreau at 14, rue de la Rochefoucauld (9e) in Paris. The museum is in his former workshop, and opened to the public in 1903. It is one of the nicest museums in Paris, jam-packed with his works. That's where I got these postcards. |
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"Plato's world of ideas." (U9.52) |
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"- The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.
- And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm." (U9.56) |
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"- That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's." (U9.76) |
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"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past." (U9.84)
After William Blake: "I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more." (Jerusalem, plate 77 'To the Christians') |
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"Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
- Haines is gone, he said. - Is he? - I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't you know, about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn't bring him in to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it." (U9.90) |