Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | SCD FICTION JOY 8 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
This is a dramatized reading of James Joyce's masterpiece adapted for BBC Radio, starring Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusack. Timelessly evocative, it is far more than the story of Stephen Dedalus' journey through Dublin. It is a huge, rich portrayal of human
Author Notes
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, into a large Catholic family. Joyce was a very good pupil, studying poetics, languages, and philosophy at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and the Royal University in Dublin.
Joyce taught school in Dalkey, Ireland, before marrying in 1904. Joyce lived in Zurich and Triest, teaching languages at Berlitz schools, and then settled in Paris in 1920 where he figured prominently in the Parisian literary scene, as witnessed by Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.
Joyce's collection of fine short stories, Dubliners, was published in 1914, to critical acclaim. Joyce's major works include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Stephen Hero. Ulysses, published in 1922, is considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. The book simply chronicles one day in the fictional life of Leopold Bloom, but it introduces stream of consciousness as a literary method and broaches many subjects controversial to its day. As avant-garde as Ulysses was, Finnegans Wake is even more challenging to the reader as an important modernist work. Joyce died just two years after its publication, in 1941.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
In 1967, when the American director Joseph Strick was filming Ulysses in Dublin, a notice appeared in a reputable bookshop: "There are over 8,000 books banned in Ireland. If by chance we have one on display, please inform us and it will be destroyed ." "The funny thing," says Strick, now 77 and living in Paris, "is that James Joyce's novel was not one of them. As it had never been published in Ireland, it had never been censored, and under-the- counter copies were available." But when Strick's film was submitted to the Irish film censor's office the following year, it was rejected outright. The script was lifted straight from the book, and its reception mirrored the response to Ulysses in 1922 when the Dublin press howled that it was "written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine". In 1968, a civil servant considering Ulysses on behalf of the then prime minister Jack Lynch reported that if the film was cleared for showing to "any class" of Irish audience, it would bring "discredit" on the government. The fortunes of Strick's film, which has now finally been passed for release in Ireland with a 15 certificate, are a measure of the enormous distance that Ireland has travelled in the last 30 years from what Brian Moore called "a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction". True to the book, the film records a series of episodes that take place in Dublin on June 16 1904. Much of the action is related through the consciousness of the three principal characters: Stephen Dedalus (Maurice Roeves), Leopold Bloom (Milo O'Shea) and Molly Bloom (Barbara Jefford). The script, like the text, switches between the spoken word and soliloquy. Strick says he always regarded Joyce as a great cinematic writer, and attributes much of the modern cinema to his inventions in Ulysses. Joyce had worked with the Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein (maker of Ivan the Terrible) and founded the Volta cinema in Dublin. Despite the radical politics that swept the campuses of Europe and America in the 60s, Ireland remained immune to the ensuing social changes. Rosaleen Lenihan, who plays the dominatrix whore-mistress in the film's Circe episode, says she remembers the police forcing a small Dublin theatre to close after a contraceptive was dropped on stage during a performance of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo. Certainly Ireland, where women had even fewer rights than their European counterparts, was not judged to be ready for what Strick calls "the pure magic: the mental pyrotechnics" of Molly Bloom, languishing in bed and falling out of her nightdress. There is no surviving explanation of the film censor's decision, but the ban reflected the official reception it received in other countries. If it was rejected in Australia, and only shown to audiences segregated by sex in New Zealand, Ulysses was not going to be welcomed with open arms in a tiny theocratic backwater such as Ireland, where dancing was deemed to be the cause of bastards. If Dublin was not ready for Ulysses on film, neither was Cannes. Robert Favre Le Bret, the director of the 1967 film festival, obliterated 29 subtitles, proclaiming: "There are certain things that can be read but not heard!" Lady Dartmouth (later Raine Spencer, stepmother of Princess Diana), then a city councillor for London, stated - without having seen the film - that if someone did not protest, "you'll have people making love in the streets". The British Board of Film Censors demanded 29 cuts. Almost all were from Molly's monologue, which takes up a fifth of the film's running time. One can surmise what Lady Dartmouth's reaction would have been to Molly's musings amid the sex-stained sheets hours after cuckolding her husband: "Never in all my life felt one so full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after what's the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a stallion driving it up into you" Strick's response was to insert in lieu of the removed sections 29 blank screens backed by a high-pitched shriek. The British censor relented. Sheamus Smith, the current censor in Dublin, says Strick's film is "innocent stuff now". He says the reason the ban has had to wait until now to be lifted is that "nobody thought to bring it back before. I'm sure that if it had been resubmitted to me 14 years ago, when I first became censor, I would have made the same decision." Strick says he is "over the moon" that Ulysses has finally been passed, but is scathing of the censor's office: "That is like saying that a prisoner could have been released from an unjust sentence if they'd only had the courtesy to ask to be let out of the hoosegow. They are craven. They pretend to be buffs when they're buffoons. They don't care about anything but the box office. They have combined to create a self-censoring industry." After the ban Strick made two appeals to the censor before giving up, then left Ireland for 25 years. In the meantime the film censor's office evolved from an institution that, in 1968 alone, banned over 100 films, to one that in the past 15 years has rejected only seven (including Natural Born Killers). The office owes its existence to 1923 legislation which judged films by "subversive content" and "threat to public morality". Now, however, it is principally a classification body. Strick finally returned to Ireland last year, to direct a bawdy comedy by Aristophanes in Cork, and says he found the country "transformed". He decided it was time to resubmit Ulysses. Women he had encountered in pre-Mary Robinson Ireland, he says, were "fearful. When I returned I saw that they were barristers and doctors." While filming Ulysses, Strick had seen Dubliners "foraging on corporation rubbish tips not yards from the beach. Nowadays unemployment is 4%!" After 33 years Joyce's own nation will finally cease to be the only one in Europe where audiences are not allowed to see the sole film of Ulysses made in English. Many will be introduced to the work for the first time. Smith, passing the film uncut, told Strick: "We owe you one." Ulysses opens in Dublin next Friday. Tanya Sillem's TV report on Ulysses will be shown on Channel 4 News at 7pm next Thursday. Caption: article-ulysses3.1 True to the book, the film records a series of episodes that take place in Dublin on June 16 1904. Much of the action is related through the consciousness of the three principal characters: Stephen Dedalus (Maurice Roeves), Leopold Bloom (Milo O'Shea) and Molly Bloom (Barbara Jefford). The script, like the text, switches between the spoken word and soliloquy. [Joseph Strick] says he always regarded [James Joyce] as a great cinematic writer, and attributes much of the modern cinema to his inventions in Ulysses. Joyce had worked with the Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein (maker of Ivan the Terrible) and founded the Volta cinema in Dublin. Certainly Ireland, where women had even fewer rights than their European counterparts, was not judged to be ready for what Strick calls "the pure magic: the mental pyrotechnics" of Molly Bloom, languishing in bed and falling out of her nightdress. There is no surviving explanation of the film censor's decision, but the ban reflected the official reception it received in other countries. If it was rejected in Australia, and only shown to audiences segregated by sex in New Zealand, Ulysses was not going to be welcomed with open arms in a tiny theocratic backwater such as Ireland, where dancing was deemed to be the cause of bastards. Strick finally returned to Ireland last year, to direct a bawdy comedy by Aristophanes in Cork, and says he found the country "transformed". He decided it was time to resubmit Ulysses. Women he had encountered in pre-Mary Robinson Ireland, he says, were "fearful. When I returned I saw that they were barristers and doctors." While filming Ulysses, Strick had seen Dubliners "foraging on corporation rubbish tips not yards from the beach. Nowadays unemployment is 4%!" - Tanya Sillem.
Library Journal Review
This duo bring June 16, 1904, to joyous life. At nine hours, AudioGO's full-cast production covers roughly half of the Dublin wanderings of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" to the final "Yes." The emphasis is on the book's opening chapters, which set up the action and establish the characters' personalities and motivations. The narrators and assorted readers adroitly apply the proper voices and levels of brogue to match the characters; Bloom and Dedalus are clear-voiced and educated, while the trio of pub-goers accompanying "the Citizen" in a particularly effective act are pure shanty Irish. Molly Bloom's monolog is delivered in the appropriately leisurely pace of a woman accustomed to long hours in bed-usually with the company of men other than her husband. Naxos offers Molly's soliloquy unabridged, giving listeners a luscious earful of the full breadth of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing. While her husband is more the intellectual, Molly is the embodiment of the physical, casually discussing her bodily functions-usually conducted in private-while even indulging in a few (one clearly can understand why this shocked in 1922). Molly is pure sensuality; her thoughts focus on the sex she's had, is having now, and hopes to have in the future. Narrator Marcella Riordan quickens the pace a tad and adds singing to her presentation of Molly's inner thoughts. VERDICT Hearing Ulysses read aloud reinforces its literary merit while proving how much fun it is rather than a high-brow slog, as Joyce's bawdy sense of humor shines through. Though a joy, AudioGO's abridgment makes the story's flow jumpy, so the program serves best as a refresher for those familiar with the text. Naxos's Molly is solid for students, Joyce heads, and anyone who enjoys fine literature. Whether your taste runs to walking the streets with Bloom and Dedalus or slipping between the sheets with Molly, this duo has it all.-Mike Rogers, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
STATELY, PLUMP Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: --Introibo ad altare Dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: --Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit. Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly. --Back to barracks, he said sternly. He added in a preacher's tone: --For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all. He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm. --Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips. --The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek. He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck. Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on. --My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid? He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried: --Will he come? The jejune jesuit. Ceasing, he began to shave with care. --Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly. --Yes, my love? --How long is Haines going to stay in this tower? Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder. --God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus; you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade. He shaved warily over his chin. --He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase? --A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk? --I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off. Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily. --Scutter, he cried thickly. He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, said: --Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor. Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said: --The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you? He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.-- ---- --God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown. --Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. --The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. --Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily. --You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you . . . He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips. --But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all. He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Excerpted from Ulysses by James Joyce All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.