Just a note on Ulysses

I tire of hearing the line that Joyce shows how modern life reveals deep mythic structures, how the Homeric narrative silently supports the 'surface story' behind the backs of the characters themselves. But there are few one to one and systematic Homeric parallels in Ulysses. It is not as if incidents in the immediate story are systemically translatable back into their Homeric ‘equivalents’, their hidden reality. Take for example the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode – this epithet could refer to the narrator but also to Bloom, whose polyoptical view of things (he can always 'see the othe fellow's point of view'), various names (Bloom/ Flower/ Virag) and fleeting connection with Everyman make him well fitted to this. Odysseus’ 20 year exile is glimpsed, arguably, in the 20-1 odds on Throwaway, like a tiny ironic splinter of the original story. The story before us does not peel away to reveal its Homeric contours. The blinding of Polyphemus, for instance, is not simply translated into Bloom’s metaphorical blinding of the monofocal Citizen, but is glimpsed in the sweep’s brush that nearly has the anonymous narrator’s eye out. In such trivial incidents are glimpsed the refracted light of the dead mythic star. The Homeric content is shattered, re-distributed, a single element appearing in Joyce’s Dublin as several splinters. What these shards (or sometimes brief jokes) do is not bridge the seeming gap between present and mythic past but to measure it.

I explain all this to Gutner in the pub. 'in literary terms, Ulysses is postmodernism's transitional object' he states boldly before ordering a plate of fried kidneys from a singing barmaid and dashing off to the bog.

Nous in the Classroom

In Gastro, an extraterritorial French café, H. and I talk about teaching. What is it that goes on in the classroom on a good day, on a day when teaching feels most worthwhile. It’s not about the successful transmission of some content – which is often the kind of model used. ‘something happens’ H. suggests, ‘it’s not an event but something happens’. ‘How to define this something?’ I say that what happens, in this situation that we both recognise, is that the class is thinking. I don’t mean merely that individuals in the class are doing some thinking. The thinking is not the sum of such individual contributions but the thinking of the class as a composite, including us.’ H: ‘exactly, and in such conditions, it is possible to speak of a ‘we’.. a ‘we’ transpires. It may not be a ‘we’ that is there next time, but for the duration of the class, there is this ‘we’'. This is why, although the ‘something happens’ is not an ‘event’ necessarily, it has this in common with the event – a ‘we’ emerges as the subject of a thinking, and one tries, or hopes, in subsequent classes, to bear fidelity to this We.

Jameson on zizek

A fairly non-commital review of The Parallax View in the LRB. I'm slightly curious, though, about the Theory/ Philosophy distinction J. makes here:

I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Zizek’s project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code (not even Lacan’s) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in the localterms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.