Poetic Beauty Research Articles

Henry Flower Writes a Story

Henry Flower Writes a Story Horst Breuer (bio) I "Henry Flower" is Leopold Bloom's assumed pen name and literary persona in Ulysses. He adopts it in a clandestine correspondence and carries around a visiting card with the name on it. Hitherto, commentators on the novel believed that no piece of writing by this wonderfully gifted man of letters survived, but they are wrong. They have overlooked a whole episode in Joyce's novel—"Eumaeus." I contend that the episode is narrated by none other than this fabulous author. Henry Flower's contribution to early-twentieth-century journalism, essayism, and belletristic writing is the epitome of a characteristically outmoded, thoughtless, sloppy style of writing, which Joyce, the radical modernist, rightly resented and ridiculed—and occasionally reproduced with ironic relish. "Make it new," Ezra Pound's battle cry for a vigorous, precise, graphic literary style, is the programmatic antidote to Henry Flower's pseudo-elegant, inflated logorrhea.1 Unlike Ernest Hemingway, who did away with all unnecessary adjectives and qualifiers, Joyce takes an entirely different approach to exposing the outworn, pre-modernist literary stance in this episode of Ulysses—not by rejecting but by mimicking it. In many sections of Ulysses, the author delights in irreverently amalgamating bits and pieces of "high" and "low" literature and culture, as is proper for an encyclopedic representation of Dublin's everyday life. "Eumaeus" is the shattering parody of what half-educated characters such as Leopold Bloom might consider a dazzlingly clever literary diction. My hypothesis is that Henry Flower's florid rhetoric is behind the episode in question. II "Eumaeus" is an ingenious compilation of almost every stylistic atrocity the author could imagine, a demonstration piece of bad writing. Its rhetoric is pretentious, long-winded, cliché-ridden, insincere—in every way, the reverse of the young Joyce's artistic ideal of exact observation, radical honesty, and terse expression in "a style of [End Page 87] scrupulous meanness" (LettersII 134).2 Stanislaus Joyce refers to the language of "Eumaeus" as "flabby Dublin journalese, with its weak effort to be witty," admiring the "almost unlimited adaptability" of his brother's writing, though regretting its increasing lack of poetic beauty (LettersIII 58). Most of the earlier critics seem to have disregarded the burlesque aspect of the narrative strategy of the episode and found little of interest in it. For many years, this section was understood as a tiresome piece of imitative writing, meant to match the late hour of the day and the fatigue of the main characters. A. Walton Litz writes of the "failure of the Eumaeus episode," and S. L. Goldberg calls it "one of the weakest sections of the book."3 This conception has undergone a marked revision in more recent years. Joycean commentators seem now to draw considerable enjoyment from the episode and its purposefully wordy and elaborate phrasings. It is found to be "a very funny chapter" by Marilyn French and "a brilliant exercise in comic obfuscation" by Zack Bowen.4 An important step towards recognition of the stylistic profile of the episode is made by Hugh Kenner, who notes the "Bloomian" quality of the narrative and points out the context of Leopold Bloom's literary ambitions and fantasies.5 A number of other critics have followed this approach,6 which is also the basis of the present contribution. The rhetorical hallmark of "Eumaeus" is a dissonant mixture of slang, attempted witticisms, would-be elegant and educated expressions, a vast number of idioms and formulas that have become trite, and sclerotic clichés, as well as countless verbosities, redundancies, linguistic stuffings, and puffed-up phrases. The worn-out quality of the language is indicated by the classification Joyce chose for the episode's "technic," according to his famous schema—"Narrative (old)."7 The overall manner of "Eumaeus" is one of pretended wit, rhetorical boasting, and attempted in-group jargon, conveying the cumulative impression of vulgarity, vacuity, and a general lack of truthfulness, self-knowledge, and identity. This jarring and insincere quality of the text is confirmed by the factual story that can be deduced from the episode. Although Stephen Dedalus (the "noctambulist"—U 17.930) may be bored and tired, Leopold Bloom...

‘Heavenly Bounty’ — Some thoughts on impact metallogeny

Impact cratering must be one of the most spectacular displays ever witnessed in the solar system. Although the ancient Indian astronomers, the ancient Vedic texts and the poets who have chronicled the history of India in the great Rā māyana and Mahā bhārata, described heavenly events in the past in lines of great poetic beauty, the subject has not evoked much interest in the modern generation of geoscientists. India has a hoary tradition of study of astronomical bodies, but these studies have come to be neglected, considered more as myths deserving no serious attention.

VEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the Sovereign

multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only o. the vitality of the multitude--as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only o. the blood of the living.--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 62. What is thus put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is nothing else than the existence of the world, of the itself.--Jacques Derrida, Le concept du 11 semptembre, 98-99. (2) Who or what will come out of global? Who or what is global, and who or what is to come out of it? From the word go, the questions multiply. There are several regimes that one can hear in the phrases global or going One is the admonition to go global, now that everybody or everything else has. An encouragement, an invitation, a welcome: go global, release yourself from national or other boundaries of identity, be free! A shipment, an envoi, is global, a letter without destination or a preprogrammed itinerary and without assured delivery. Going might be precisely this possibility of never arriving or never arriving properly; but also might be never having departed from a certain, designated space in the first place. other sense, the other direction, of global, is quite the opposite, a warding-o. of the global: Go, go away global! should go away with all its misery, the political and ecological devastation that follow globalization like a shadow. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt warned, almost sixty years ago, in Origins of Totalitarianism, that The danger that [is] a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages (302). That danger of will be or will have been a reverse potential of any global. Is going global good to go? Who or what will come out of it? One should hear in going global an almost poetic beauty, an alliteration of g/gl, gl/g, go, go, goo, goo, gl, gl, al/la, la/al, la/la, a poetic equivalence, to speak in Roman Jakobson's terms: a language in its infancy, with all the future and the potentiality of senses, meanings, combinations, and directions open to it. Going would be the very glottic opening of language and into language, a pleasure of a glossa, of words, an enjoyment in and of the words, a glottal-global, globetrotting experience that is almost literary--poetic, unpredictable, free to go anywhere, the of and dissemination of the global, the is/as global, g-o-o-o-o global!, and, Heidegger would have it, the worlds. Going would be the becoming of the totality of senses, senses and meanings that go in every direction, towards what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the creation of the world, or globalization: La creation du monde ou la mondialisation (2002). Going a pleasure, a jouissance of global, as an exercise of an infinitely finite and insatiable signification which is the act of being in a sense of being placed in the world (l'exercice insatiable et infiniment fini qui est l'etre en acte du sens mis en monde) (64). By the same token, one should not forget that this alliteration, global, this glottic repetition, and the meaning for which it stands and it stands, is possible only in English, and that is on at the expense of other languages and cultures. You cannot go in French, Russian, German, my native Serbo-Croat, or any other language. Going sentences other cultures not to a poetic but to a generalized equivalence, a forced translation of an English-dominated globalization. Going may be seen, thus, the slogan of a generalized erasure of all alterity, singular difference, idioms, and idiomaticity. …

Meditations on Blade Runner

The 1982 film, Blade Runner, presents many questions conceming the position and relevance of the human being in the postmodern epoch. The audience is confronted with androids, called replicants, incredibly handsome "beings" whose language rises at times to poetic beauty, while the humans in the film are embarrassing physical and moral examples of the species. With whom will the audience identify or sympathize, the human or the simulacrum? The film further complicates this issue by incorporating traditional Christian symbols and language in relation to the replicants. The film seems to suggest that consciousness is the defining characteristic of humanness, whether one speaks of an organic human being or a replicant. Current debate between scientists, philosophers, and theologians centers on the question of consciousness and its relationship to the brain and, for some, the soul This essay addresses the dilemmas in the film, while keeping in mind the central question: What is a human being?

Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books

The inspirational tale of eight women who defied the confines of life in revolutionary Iran through the joy and power of literature. 'That room for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers ...We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.' For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. Shy and uncomfortable at first, they soon began to open up and speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading - 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Washington Square', 'Daisy Miller' and 'Lolita' - their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of the revolution when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. Azar Nafisi's luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.

Hemingway's Death in the afternoon: the complete annotations

The exotic and poetic beauty of the bullfight has captured the imagination of observers and readers for decades. No book has explained and disseminated this ancient art with as much power as Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Since its publication in 1932, this classic study has shaped American notions of Spain and the Spanish art of bullfighting. Preceded by the short stories and novels that firmly established Hemingway as a master of modernist fiction, Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's first volume of nonfiction prose, a medium which enables him to explore his life, his art, his times, and his wide-ranging interests. Mandel's book engages and explicates all aspects of Death in the Afternoon. Her introductory essay provides important historical backgrounds and contemporary facts about the various elements of bullfighting--the bull, the bullbreeder, the bullfighter, the bullring, and the corrida itself-that Hemingway describes. The body of her book is devoted to detailed, definitive annotations of the several hundred persons, animals, events, and cultural artifacts that Hemingway included in his wide-ranging book. These alphabetically-arranged entries reveal Hemingway's views on painting, sculpture, architecture, sports, politics, economics, travel, music, food, drink, sex, language, and literature. Comprehensive endnotes, a multi-lingual bibliography, attractive illustrations, and an index complete the encyclopedic volume. It is an essential companion for all readers and teachers of Hemingway.

Dieu et les dieux chez F. Creuzer et F.G. Welcker

In the first half of the 19th century some German classical scholars tried to understand the pagan religions of antiquity as genuine religions, containing an intuition of the truth. F. Creuzer regarded popular beliefs and cults of all ancient peoples as a “religion of the imagination”;, a “pantheism of the imagination”;, but thought that, besides that popular religion, there existed a much deeper, esoteric pantheism, which was passed on from one generation to another and from one country to another by priests‐sages. In Greece, according to him, popular religion became more superficial than anywhere else; its religious content was to a large extent substituted by poetic and artistic beauty.

Arnold, Wordsworth, and “Memorial Verses”

ARNOLD, WORDSWORTH, AND “ MEMORIAL VERSES" HARVEY KERPNECK University of Toronto I n the essay on Wordsworth Arnold makes a famous distinction between higher and lower kinds of poetry. He has been working to discriminate the essence of Wordsworth's "superiority" in order that he might save his reputa­ tion for posterity from the ignorant neglect of the mass, on the one hand, and the meaningless idolatry of the "Wordsworthians," on the other. And he remarks that it is "the great and ample body of powerful work" that is left when an editor has pruned Wordsworth's luxuriance (his essay is an introduction to an anthology of selections from Wordsworth) that establishes this superiority. He goes on: Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others. The ballad kind is alower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is alower kind. Poetry of this latter sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and simple, but then this can only be when the poet producing it has the power and importance of Wordsworth.1 Arnold himself is such a poet, of course, and despite his strictures in his 1853 Preface against poetry in which the poet "allegorizes" the state of his own mind, it is a commonplace today that his most interesting poetry is his most subjective, self-concerned didactic poetry, poetry in which he describes more or less straightforwardly his spiritual dilemmas, ascribes causes to them, and prescribes remedies for them or notes analogous ills in his contemporaries. And one can discuss much of his total output in these terms; one can even "do something" with "Sohrab and Rustum" (father-son relationship) or “ The Forsaken Merman" (the buried life), for example. But with "Memorial Ver­ ses," Arnold's funeral tribute to Wordsworth, one should hesitate even to make the attempt. The poem, commissioned by Wordsworth's son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, and published in June 1850 in Fraser's Magazine, is only one of a number of tributes to Wordsworth in Arnold's prose and verse, but in concen­ tration, form, and polish, in intensity, it is the premier one. It does help us to see more clearly the roots of Arnold's view, later fully enunciated, that, as he puts it in his essay on Wordsworth, "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to English Studies in Can ad a, ii, 2, Summer 1976 life." This view of poetry is implicit in the whole and in each part of "Memorial Verses." But the poem is not didactic in this sense-Arnold is neither expound­ ing a theory of poetry in it nor making an oblique comment on the situation of the poet in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the poet Matthew Arnold. He is attempting, as in the Wordsworth essay, to pay a tribute to Wordsworth which shall be a discriminating assessment, which shall be neither supercilious and condemnatory nor adulatory and fawning. The poem is a remarkable attempt to take a balanced view of Wordsworth in the midst of funeral passion for him (a passion which Arnold shares). And it is an attempt to do so according to those "law s" to which Arnold in his criticism pays so much obeisance, the "laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."2 In other words, the poem is not didactic in a second sense either, that of being versified polemic almost indistinguishable from prose, as some of Arnold's lesser poetry of this same period is. It "says" a great deal about Wordsworth and Arnold's passion for him, but it does so at least as much by indirection as by direct statement, and it does so by exploiting much of the array of poetic rhetoric available to Arnold. The poem opens with a five-line introduction and general statement of the occasion and an indication of the method Arnold is to employ to assess Wordsworth for the age: Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb...

Language and Reality in Abraham J. Heschel's Philosophy of Religion

The relation of inner spiritual life to traditional theological and philosophical categories is the dynamic foundation of Abraham J. Heschel's religious thought. Not systematic in form, nor objectively philosophical in intent, his writings have suffered from lack of scholarly attention in great part because their consistent conceptual framework is not immediately apparent. The beauty of his style, however, has been recognized, though often to the detriment of serious consideration of the intellectual system implicit in his vision. His texts have indeed been appreciated as devotional literature by Christians as well as Jews because of the vitality of their poetry. Close scrutiny reveals that Heschel's use of language follows a coherent and explicit theory which, though dispersed in different works, is rigorous and susceptible to critical understanding. An account of Heschel's linguistic assumptions can clarify his interpretation of religious tradition, with the broader benefit of helping us to participate in the spiritual awareness which his personal witness should convey. Heschel's endeavor is founded upon a logical contradiction which his theory of poetic language seeks to harmonize. On the one hand, he attempts to evoke in his reader authentic religious insights which are, in essence, ineffable by expressing his own experience in passages of great poetic beauty. On the other hand, he presents a conceptualized description of man's relation to God using accepted theological and philosophical categories as points of reference. The very tension which this paradox involves is at the root of religious understanding in Heschel's sys-

Verdi and Spanish Romantic Drama

AS LITERATURE veers from objectivity and realism, as it tends toward the subjective and the emotional, it becomes more closely allied with musical expression. It would be logical to assume that dramas of exceptional power and poetic beauty, of violent passion and emotional conflict, such as those produced at the height of the Romantic Movement in Spain, would attract musical interpretation. But when we study the contribution of Spanish Romanticism to opera, we are confronted with facts both revealing and puzzling. We do find Spanish themes in grand opera, but with the exception of three musicians of minor importance, Giuseppe Verdi was the only composer of opera to adapt themes from the Spanish Romantic drama.' Moreover, Verdi adopted these themes against the advice of his friends and librettists.

XIX.—The Dragon and His Lair in Beowulf

Rather less attention has been paid to the later portion of Beowulf than to the earlier adventures; Grendel and his dam have, as it were, been more beloved of the commentators than has the dragon. There is every reason, however, why the fight with the dragon should receive careful attention. It is, despite some damaged and illegible passages, of great poetic beauty, with a dignity and a brooding atmosphere of impending fate which are quite its own. And it stands greatly in need of critical as well as of appreciative examination; for there is much which presents difficulty in the interpretation of the text, and in larger problems for the solution of which textual study is necessary.

The Bearing of Historical Studies on the Religious Use of the Bible

The Bible is better understood by scholars today than ever before, but it seems to be at the same time less generally used and less enjoyed, and it is natural to ask whether there is a connection between the increasing knowledge of the book by specialists and the lessening familiarity with it and regard for it among the people. The problem thus suggested is not an isolated one. In regard to other books it may be asked whether the advance of learning is accompanied by a gain or a loss in the capacity to read with enjoyment and uplift; and in regard to other facts than those recorded in the Bible the question is in place whether scientific study stimulates or dulls the sense of their poetic beauty or spiritual value. Yet the problem is peculiarly pressing in regard to the Bible and the facts it records, because of the unique significance of these books and of this history for our higher life.

Book Reviews

MR. FLAGG is evidently an enthusiastic lover and close observer of nature in all her moods and phases, but this more from the sentimental and poetic than from the scientific point of view. His book consists of a great number of essays on various aspects of nature as manifested in the New England country, the most original being on the songs of the birds of that region. That he must be a very patient and very minute observer is evidenced by the fact that he has actually embodied in musical notation the songs of some of the principal singing birds of New England. We have no means of testing the correctness of Mr. Flagg's interpretation of these singers, but we should think, judging from the very careful observations he has evidently made, that they are generally correct. The work also contains essays on the aspects of nature in the various months of the year, and on such subjects as “The Haunts of Flowers,” “Water Scenes,” “The Field and the Garden,” “Picturesque Animals,” “The Flowerless Plants,” “Swallows: their Hibernation,” “Changes in the Habits of Birds,” &c. Mr. Flagg's essays, we must say, are on the whole rather tedious, reminding us often of the tiresome moral essayists of last century, although they frequently contain passages of quite poetic beauty. There is also a sufficient amount of novelty about many of the subjects to add interest to his observations, and many facts are recorded concerning the habits of the New England birds that will give the book some value in the eyes of the naturalist. Those who love a quiet dreamy country life will find much throughout the book to interest them. Mr. Flagg, as we have said, evidently possesses the power of minute observation, and we would recommend him to bring himself abreast of the ornithology, and indeed general natural history, of the day, and carry on his observations from a more scientific point of view, which he can easily do, and still find scope enough for the satisfaction of his sentimentalism; he might thus render substantial service to science. Judging from what he says about the “hibernation” of swallows, he seems to be unaware that anything has been written on the subject of the migration of birds since the days of Gilbert White. Mr. Flagg's essays want the simplicity and naturalness and geniality of the Letters of that minute observer.