What do You think about Ulysses (1990)?
انا بحب الرواية دي من ساعة ما شوفت صورة لمارلين مونرو وهي بتقرأها , وأنا بحب مارلين بصراحة فحبيت اللي بتقرأه : لكن وأنا بقرأ الرواية دي كان شكلي عامل كدا :ت.إس.إليوت في معرض حديثه عن هذه الرواية بيقول:عن طريق استخدام الأسطورة و استغلال التوازي المستمر بين المعاصرة والقِدَم , يتبع السيد جويس طريقة يجب على الآخرين تقليده فيها ... و هي ببساطة طريقة للتحكم والتنظيم و إضفاء شكل و أهمية على مشهد العبث و الفوضى الطاغي الذي يمثله التاريخ المعاصر لو قُدر لنص أدبي أن يقدس , لكانت عوليس هي الرواية المختارة .طب بالله عليكم , دا يتقال عنها إيه , ولا تتوصف بإيه ؟ دي مش رواية مكتوبة , دا عمل أدبي منحوت , منحوت من صخر صلد , الكاتب مكنش بيكتب مجرد رواية أدبية يُخلد بها إسمه , لأ , دا بيكتب عقاب , عقاب أدبي لكل واحد تسول له نفسه إنه يفتكر فيها العظمة والابداع , ليه كدا يا جيمس ؟ ليه كدا يا حبيبي , دا إحنا غلابة والمصحف , عملنا لك إيه علشان تعمل فينا كدا , وكله بمزاجك , عايز تقرأها إقرأها , مش عايز , لا يكلف الله نفسًا إلا وسعها . الرواية اللي ممكن متفهمش منها حاجة , لكن مجرد ما تنتهي منها هتلاقيها بقت جزء منك (وكنا بنتريق على هاروكي موراكامي إن قططه بتسمع مزيكا , دا إحنا غلابة ) , الرواية المتاهة , اللي لو فلتت منك في جزئية هتظل حبيس صفحاتها وعقلك متعلق بها .بص يابني : في نوع من الأدب , حلو وسهل وظريف , والأديب من دول لا بيتعب دماغه ولا بيتعب دماغك معاه , بيقدمك العمل سهل وبسيط , يعني من الآخر بيقدم لك الأكلة جاهزة وانت تتذوق وتمزز فيها براحتك , الأدب دا حلو , حلو خالص , حلو جدا .وفي بقى نوع تاني من الأدب : هو بيتخطى مفهوم الأدب , بيتخطى كل الحدود وكل المعايير , ليصنع هو حدود ومعايير لا يقترب منها أحد (واللي عايز يجرب يقرب هو بقى ) , يعني الكاتب لا بيجيب لك أكل ولا حتى مكونات , وبيقول لك اشبع أنت يا حلو , نوع الكاتب فيه بيخترع حياة وعالم , عالم يخلقه هو , وينسج تفاصيله و أحداثه وشخصياته , كلها من خياله , كلها من ابتكاره , ابن الظالم اخترع لغة , أول لنقل إنه اخترع استخدام خاص للغة عريقة , بيعلم على الانجليز . النوع التاني قد لا يجد انتشار في زمن معين , ولا يجد اهتمام ولا حتى شعبية , ولكنه يضمن خلود وعظمة لا يقربها أي خلود آخر , عظمة الآلهة الأدبية المقدسة , كآلهة الأولمب العظماء .المهم : نحن أمام عمل وُصف على أنه الأعظم على مر العصور , وحتى هذا الوصف لا يفيه عقه من العظمة والابداع , فهذا عمل لا يشببه أي عمل آخر , ولا يقترب من عظمته أي رواية أخرى , رواية ؟ وهل هي رواية ؟ و أي رواية تلك التي تحتاج إلى كامل خلايا عقلك لكي تندمج معها وتفهمها , لا , أنت تحتاج لكامل عقلك لكي لا تفقده ويتشتت منك , فتشعر بجنون وحيرة لا يضاهيها حيرة , منطقي جدا وأنت بتقرأ الرواية دي إنك فجأة تقفلها وتبدأ من أول وجديد , منطقي إنك تقرأها بصوت عالي , ومنطقي إنك تلاقي نفسك بتضحك بصوت عالي وتعمل حركات غريبة بوشك , رواية غريبة , هتعمل علاقة معها كعلاقة حب بينك وبين فتاة , هتندمج فيها بلا أي مبرر منطقي , وهتلاقي صعوبة وتعقيد مريب لكن مش هتقدر تتركها , هي سحر البيان , وسحر الكلمة وسحر التشكيل , إيه دا , أي روح ملعونة تلبست جويس , وأي واد جن قام بزيارته ليخرج علينا بهذا النص , أي ألعاب لعينة مارسها هذا الكاتب , لكي يتسرب إلى عقولنا بهذا الشكل ويترك علينا هذا السحر .كارل يونغ كان بعت رسالة لجويس بيقول له فيها : (« يوليسيسكَ يا سيّدي قد قدّمتِ العالمَ على أنّه معضلة سيكولوجيّة مُقْلِقة، و التي قد عُنيتُ بها مرارًا بسلطةٍ مفترضة على الأمور النفسية.يوليسيس تثبت أنها مثل ثمرة جوزٍ صلبة بشكل مفرط. كتابك بالإجمال قد وهبني لانهايةً لمشكلة كنتُ قد أطلتُ التفكير فيها طيلة ثلاث سنوات حتى نجحت في أن أضع نفسي في مواجهةٍ معها. لكن، لابد لي أن أخبرك أني أشعر بالإمتنان العميق تجاهك- تماما مثل ما هو تجاه تحفتك العظيمة لأنني تعلمتُ الكثير بسببها. من الممكن أني لستُ متأكدًا لو أني قد إستمتعت بها؛ لأنها قصدتْ أن تكون محطّمةً للأعصاب للغاية، و و للمادة الرمادية(أحد مكونات الجهاز العصبي). و لا أدري أيضًا إذا ما كان سيعجبك ما قد كتبته عن يوليسيس؛ لأنه يساعدُ في أن أخبر العالم كم هو شعور الملل الذي كنتُ أشعر ) ودا يونغ , يبقى إحنا الغلابة يجرى لنا إيه ..الفكرة دائمًا في إبداع الإنسان , وعقله الغريب المعقد , ورحه المقدسة القادرة على إثارة الدهشة دائما ,وحياة الإنسان البالغة البساطة والتعقيد في آن واحد , يوم واحد , يوم واحد هو زمن الرواية دي , الرواية اللي حيرت الملايين وقامت من أجلها الدنيا ولم تقعد من يومها , زمنها يوم واحد , بكل تفاصيله وشخصياته و حكاياته , بكل الفكر المنتشر فيها , بكم المعلومات الرهيبة المذكورة فيها , كل دا في يوم واحد , يوم واحد يا مؤمن , خلانا نعيش أيام من المعاناة في مجرد قراءتها , ما بالك الكاتب ؟لازم تعيش في 16 يونيو دا التفاصيل كلها , لازم عليك تعرف ليوبولد بلوم ومراته واصحابه وافعاله , لازم تتقمص ذكرى اليوم كاملة . الخيال يا خوانا , لازم يكون عدك خيال جامح ليقترب (مجرد اقتراب من خيال الرواية وكاتبها ) تيار الوعي وسنينه السودا , ماله الأدب المبتذل ولا الأدب المريح المفهوم , اللي تقرأ له ولا كأنك قرأت حاجة , لازم نقرأ لحاجة دسمة يعني , لازم تيار الوعي دا , اللي مطلوب منك تركيز 1000% علشان الرواية لا تفلت منك , وتحاول تفهمها , رغم إن الفهم غير مهم في الأساس , لأن الرواية قبل أن تخاطب عقلك , تخاطب روحك و نفسك الدفينة .اللغة : أنا سمعت كثير عن ألاعيب جيمس جويس اللغوية , سمعت عن حس دعابته العالي المذهل , لكن مجرد ما بتواجه نص كدا بتقول إن أكيد في حاجة مش طبيعية , الكاتب أيرلندي يكره الانجليز , فأراد ان يتفوق عليهم , وهل يوجد تفوق أعلى من أن تتفوق على خصمه في ملعبه ؟ ولهذا أبدع جويس في استخدام اللغة الانجليزية ولكن ليس ذلك الاستخدام العادي التقليدي , بل هو استخدام جديد سُجل باسمه هو ولم يوجد بعد من يجيد استخدامه أو حتى تقليده , كم الدراسات اللي اتعملت على الوراية وكم المحاولات لفك طلاسيمها وفي النهاية تبوء كلها بالفشل . كل فصلة وكل حرف وكل سطر وكل جملة , لها أهميتها , ولذلك نجد أن مشاكل الطبعات لا تنتهي .الترجمه : لنا أن نتخيل مترجم مثل د\ طه محمود طه , يفني من عمره 20 عام بالتمام والكمال لكي يخرج لنا هذا النص بلغتنا العربية , لازم نشكر هذا الرجل من صميم قلبنا , ونشفق عليه لكم المعاناة اللي أكيد واجهها أثناء ترجمته , وهو في الأصل كان يخطط لعمل دراسة عن ألدوس هكسلي ولكنه وقع في سحر جويس وعوليسه ليتفرغ لها , ويقوم بزيارة الأماكن المذكورة في محاولة منه ليتقرب من روحها .الرواية العظيمة بحق , و واحدة من الروايات الفارقة في تاريخ الرواية , فنقول ما قبل عوليس وما بعدها , النص الغريب المعقد الصعب الساحر , النص الذي يسيطر عليك بكل تفاصيله , قد لا تجد فيه متعة ما , ولكنك ستجد فيه روح ادبية قادرة على الخلود .
—Ahmed
On Not Reviewing this Book*this review has a lot of swearing in it and for that I apologize. drinking requires apologies*I have about thirty pages, front and back, of notes on this book, I swear. My intentions for the review were epic in proportion: multiple Ian-Graye style headings, a dissertation level of analysis, and a wealth of puns scattered throughout. But of course, books leave their impact in complex and frustrating ways and initially, any semblance of a review was far too intimidating. Then, there arose other reasons—that are personal and embarrassing—as to why I did not even want to look at the damn thing ever again. Certain emotions cling and others fade away and I feel quite fortunate for the ones that have departed and the ones that have yet to leave. I look back on this book with warm nostalgia and a longing for the past.So, perhaps I can write about this book now. Perhaps.On Reviewing this Book: a Personal AnecdoteI read this over the summer of 2012, reading about 100 pages a week. When I fawn over my hardcover copy and admire the eye-patched picture of Joyce, memories spring up, automatically. I reminisce about the swimming pool my friend manages and my free-access to it summer-long. The months of June and July were probably the hottest I’ve ever experienced in Colorado. So in between the days I worked—outside, wedding services, black clothes, 13 hour shifts—I would waste an entire day at the pool, reading Ulysses and jumping into the cool, refreshing water every thirty minutes. This is life, I tell you. Beautiful warmth, great literature, and water slides. But most of all, at the end of each week, I got to meet with the most beautiful girl I’d ever met at a coffee shop and talk about the book. The first day we met to read the book was June 16th, 2012. Every conversation hit the “standing-up and nearly screaming” type of excitement that only I achieve when talking about the things I love the most. Only with literature have I experienced that epiphanic, everything fits together type of religious sensation. Ulysses delivered that in droves. Nearly every page is its own work of art that deserves to be read and cherished. My Joyceful friend knew a staggering amount about the Bible and Greek Myths, so the over-abundance of references that I missed, she would point out and the over-abundance of theories that I spun, worked in tandem with information we gathered. Imagine a 20 year old, slightly pretentious-looking college student, leaping out of his chair, exclaiming his excitement for all the coffee house patrons to hear and imagine the blonde-hair girl opposite, laughing and smiling at the response.Joyce Has So Much Fucking Swagger, Jay-Z Ain’t Got Shit on HimI remember reading a line in Ulysses that proclaims that Ireland doesn’t have its masterpiece yet. . . yet! The book went airborne and crashed against my wall. That pretentious and self-satisfied fuck! I had never been so pissed at an author for intruding on the text. I finally got over myself and continued reading. It took maybe three pages of Siren’s section to realize that yes, Joyce totally earns that intrusion about masterpieces. The writing is so frequently virtuosic and dazzling and well-written that it’s hard to not to think about how much of a genius Joyce was and wonder how the hell he ever got so good at using the english language.He does just about every imaginable thing a person could do to the language while still managing to make you laugh/cry/scream in joy.EmpiricismI had, at the time, what I thought to be some brilliant reading of the whole book and how Joyce incorporates sense experience in his writing to create a continuous stream-of-consciousness that is always correcting itself and rewriting itself, as the act of conscious experience is an act of writing and rewriting narratives to make sense of the outer world, an idea that I copped from Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained who copped it from Derrida or something. There are jaw-dropping scenes that incorporate the characters’ sensual experiences, their thoughts about that experience and the memories that constantly inform their interpretations of those original experiences all in a single moment. The third chapter of the book constitutes what I deem to be (actually my literature teacher deemed it so but I will just use it to sound smart) one of the few true stream-of-conscious-thought pieces of writing. Loves loves to fucking love loveWhat a classic line. And bully for Joyce for pouring such sentimentality into his masterpiece of high-brow literature. Did you know there’s essentially a romance novella written in the middle of this book? I bet you didn’t know that. And goddamn if it isn’t better than any romance novel I’ve read. Joyce probably made a list of things that he wanted to “take care of” as far as writing the book was concerned. And over the seven years (?) it took him to write the book, I’m sure Joyce ticked off several items off the list, and with each, he chuckled to himself and went back to fucking shit up with his typewriter.The Nightmare of HistorySpeaking of classic lines. I thought a lot of about the history being a nightmare. You know, towards the end, Joyce described Bloom and Stephen as somnambulists (sleepwalkers) and my mind exploded—i.e. the whole book was the nightmare the characters were trying to wake up from.Then I thought about how much Joyce references works of other literature (especially Shakespeare, holy shit there’s a lot of shakespeare in this thing). And Stephen struggles to be a writer because he can’t stop thinking about how his work resembles works from the past, from history. And my mind exploded.I think about how history is a nightmare, yet the ending, the beautiful, bittersweet ending, jumps into the past. Joyce embraces the past at the end, but not after making the present moment so beautiful.The Present, The Everyday, The EpiphanyMy modern short story teacher once described narratives with “epiphanic realizations” as Joycean. I think I know why. Since history is what haunts Joyce’s novel, he tries to show the present moment for all the beauty that it is. This is why the book takes place over one day. He is trying to show how much beauty and meaning is packed into the everyday mundane. People drink at pubs, people go to funerals, people flirt with other people. People give birth. Don’t even get me started on the Oxen of the Sun aka “the greatest thing done with the english language, it’s fucking demonstrable, it is”. Okay, here’s the deal. There’s a girl giving birth upstairs, so Joyce decides to give birth to the english language. He writes in Angelo fucking Saxon and then works his way up through all the evolutions of the language until he returns to modern day vernacular. No one had ever even gotten close to doing that kind of ventriloquistic madness and no one ever will. David Mitchell is a pussy.Okay I’m sorry about the D. Mitch comment. That was messed up. I still love him.Anyway, nearly everything in the novel is connected by this idea, that the present moment ought to be celebrated. It gives justification for all the literary tricks within. All the literary tricks are meant to make the mundane, beautiful. Is that Bloom walking into a bar? Or is it a retelling of Odysseus sailing past the sirens, being pulled in by their beautiful song (transposed *(pun fucking intended)* in Joyce’s poetic prose). The entire section is first of all, really beautiful and second of all, filled with music imagery. Then there’s this blind character who keeps “tap tap tapping” around as we, the reader, “tap tap tap” around the prose to get our bearings, trying out sounds in order to orient ourselves in a setting, reinterpreting the sense data to create narrative and Joyce uses the sounds of music to convey this in order to show how a blind person creates a narrative out of life with sound. And now we’ve gone full circle, connecting back to one of my first points. Boom bitch!James Joyce is the Original Based God and Lil ‘b is just his Lowly FollowerSwag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swaghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukhk_I...Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag Swag SwagPuns out the WaazooI won’t even pretend to make any puns in this review. I would just fail under the punning prowess that is the Joyceman.There’s a part where Bloom orders a sandwich and he thinks about how the ham sandwich ended up on his plate with the ingredients “bred and mustered there”. Obviously to talk about the deplorable state of factory farming. Because, obviously Joyce was a vegetarian and animal-rights activist. Only in my deluded readings of his book probably.A Failed Love PoemThe fair, misses that I met with was named Erin Greenhalgh. I only say this because flip to page 123 and you’ll understand.Erin Green(halgh), gem of the silver sea,so inadequate to depict you as merely pretty—you leave far behind the likes of Remedios the beauty—confounding my inane iambs and cleverly-metered trochee.Trying to capture the experience of your being with me,renders all dewey-eyed ideals into weakening words in atrophy.Such is the attempt to capture every single quiddityof the deft, green beauty in the gem of the sea.Still as I navigate thru currents and against the breezeI succumb to the inevitable tide, ineluctable in its emotional pleas.Waves crashing within, any any sight, they screamin a sense, blinding all thoughts, its power must be.So to pen down these things, only things it relieves,still remains the wonderment inherent in thee.Unable to continue in second-person flattery,I’ll retreat back to third, with what I remember, a story.Once intoned in her words so suffused in poetry,that in the search for meaning, language is a commodity.But I hope this is not any purchase, in dollar or penny,of the uncommodifiable desires of human feelings, plenty.So to the face of a thousand ships, here’re my words, not many:I worry about the eventual demise of our proximity.Winding towards its end, our summer Odyssey,on the cusp of being too trite and not cliché hopefully!Never let it die; our interactions are so lovelyand let’s keep this skiff abreast the waves chatting literature and life over coffee.-SM
—Stephen M
“You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”William FaulknerJoyce considered writing a hard work and not just a form of expression. You can compare the complexity of his work to that sought by architects, in the structures of cathedrals. But an author, some people may say, can not and should not write exclusively for the world of artists, but must base his work solidly in reality. And it's exactly what Joyce wanted to do, think that he wanted to write 'for' the people as well as 'the people', because Joyce, described himself as a "socialist artist". I want to mention the fact that one of the first people to receive a free copy directly from the author was François Quinton, a waiter of his favorite restaurant in Paris, and not some professor. And there's a funny episode when a young man comes up to him and says, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" Joyce replies, ‘No – it did a lot of other things too. In Ulysses,(that in Finnegans Wake is described as "uselessly unreadable blue book of eccles") the difficulty of text doesn't aim to avoid ordinary readers, nor to apply only to the experts; instead the intention is to talk about the complexity of life itself, of an existence that is not and can never be taken lightly. It's not by chance that in chapter 3 a voice seems to question us :You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think?The difficulty of Ulysses is not due to snobbery, but from the desire that anyone who reads it can declare himself an expert "just like anyone watching a sport event will have the right to form a valid opinion on what he sees."Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying... to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.– James Joyce in a letter to his brother Stanislaus.Why read it?Ulysses can be read with passion without intellectually understanding the text. In this case, we identify ourselves completely with the character, our imagination lays hold of his sensation, his pleasure, his reminiscences, and we live with him, we dream with him. The prolonging of the interior monologue in our imagination will provoke pure reverie…Because the interior monologue in its fragmentary incoherence includes, as we have seen before, all the logical structure and grammatical armature of thought.–Emeric FischerSome other good reason are that it will definitely change you as a reader. It's frustrating yes, but the language is amazing. And another thing, don't listen to anybody who says there's no plot, that the story is a man just walking across Dublin. There is everything in this book, that's why it's so frustrating. You can find yourself transported from a walk on a beach to the dilemmas about death or to a contemplation about the origins of man. It teach us how to be frank with such dilemmas and it also remind us how men and women have their own sexual desires. Anyway, I prefer writing over plot.Ok, is this book so amazing? No! you can hate it, you want to throw it away at some point, you can also have a slight headache. Read well the warnings and contraindications or discuss with a doctor before taking Joyce's products. So, for anyone who wants to read other bad opinions, take a look below of what Virginia Woolf thought about Ulysses. And for the fans of Marcel Proust there is also a scene in Paris where he gets rid of Joyce.......Virginia Woolf confided to her diary her own withering assessment of the two hundred pages she had read so far... "I...have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters--to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200. " Having begun to suspect - as noted above - that Joyce was probably beating her at her own game she tells her diary: "I dislike Ulysses more & more--that is think it more & more unimportant; & don't even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it." Eight days after last reporting that she had read just 200 pages, she tells her diary, “I should be reading the last immortal chapter of Ulysses.And three days later she tells her diary, “I finished Ulysses”.Just what does this mean? That she had finished with it--not that she had read it all, let alone tried “conscientiously to make out its meanings.” She does what she can to justify her dismissal of it: "I finished Ulysses, & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board [sic] schoolboy, say like Henry Lamb, full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; & only once; & it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair. I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face--as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy." Ps: Tom, great Tom is T. S. Eliot who said : "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape". I'm going back in time as with Virginia Woolf, to meet another rival of Joyce...Proust.The two are widely regarded as rivals; their works are often compared - though accounts vary widely, one thing is for certain: neither had read the work of the other (or neither admitted to it).Marcel Proust Gets Rid of James JoyceHôtel Majestic, avenue Kléber, ParisMay 19th 1922For some time, the British art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff have been plotting to gather the four men they consider the world’s greatest living artists – Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust – together in the same room.Picasso and Stravinsky arrive in good time. The less dependable James Joyce arrives after coffee, drunk and shabby, swaying from side to side. ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond,’ he admits. He sits to the right of his host, places his head in his hands, and says nothing.Proust, is placed between Igor Stravinsky and Sydney Schiff. Stravinsky notes he is ‘as pale as a mid-afternoon moon’. Proust tries to pay Stravinsky a compliment by comparing him to Beethoven.‘Doubtless you admire Beethoven,’ he adds.‘I detest Beethoven.’‘But, cher maître, surely those late sonatas and quartets …?’‘Worse than the others.’Encounters at parties are subject to the vagaries of memory, and further obscured by layers of gossip and hearsay and inaudibility, the whole mix invariably transformed even more by alcohol. So it is unsurprising that the Proust/Joyce exchange should be related in at least seven different ways:1) As told by Joyce’s friend Arthur Power:Proust: Do you like truffles?Joyce: Yes, I do.2) As told by the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre:Proust: I have never read your works, Mr Joyce.Joyce: I have never read your works, Mr Proust.3) As told by James Joyce many years later to Jacques Mercanton:‘Proust would talk only of duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.’4) As told by James Joyce to his close friend Frank Budgen:‘Our talk consisted solely of the word “No”. Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, “No.” Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said, “No.” And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.’5) According to another friend of Joyce, Padraic Clum, Joyce wants to undermine the Schiifs’ hopes for a legendary occasion, so tries to stay as silent as possible:Proust: Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess...Joyce: No, Monsieur.Proust: Ah, you know the Countess...Joyce: No, Monsieur.Proust: Then you know Madame...Joyce: No, Monsieur.However, in this version, Joyce clearly wrong-foots himself, as his silence becomes part of the legend.6) As told by William Carlos Williams:Joyce: I’ve had headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.Proust: My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me.In fact, I must leave at once.Joyce: I’m in the same situation. If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!Proust: Charmé. Oh, my stomach.7) As told by Ford Madox Ford:Proust: As I say, Monsieur, in Du Côté de chez Swann, which without doubt you have –Joyce: No, Monsieur.(pause)Joyce: As Mr Bloom says in my Ulysses, which, Monsieur, you have doubtless read...Proust: But, no, Monsieur.(pause)Proust apologies for his late arrival, ascribing it to malady, before going into the symptoms in some detail.Joyce: Well, Monsieur, I have almost exactly the same symptoms.Only in my case, the analysis...And from then on, for a number of hours, the two men discuss their various illnesses.According to Schiff, who has a leaning towards accuracy, the party ends with Proust inviting the Schiffs back to his apartment, and with Joyce squeezing into the taxi too. Joyce then starts smoking, and opens the window, causing upset to Proust, an asthmatic who hates fresh air. In the brief journey, Proust talks incessantly, but addresses none of his remarks to Joyce.When the four of them alight in rue Hamelin, Joyce tries to join the others in Proust’s apartment, but they do their best to divert him. ‘Let my taxi take you home,’ insists Proust, before disappearing upstairs with Violet Schiff, leaving Sydney Schiff to bundle Joyce back into the taxi. Free of Joyce’s company at last, Proust and the Schiffs drink champagne and talk merrily until daybreak.* Proust’s handshake lacks vigour. ‘There are many ways of shaking hands. It is not too much to say that it is an art. He was not good at it. His hand was soft and drooping … There was nothing pleasant about the way he performed the action,’ writes his friend Prince Antoine Bibesco. Joyce’s right hand is another matter. When a young man comes up to him in Zürich and says, ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ Joyce replies, ‘No – it did a lot of other things too.’
—Emilian Kasemi