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Charles Dickens p. 1

Édouard Dujardin p. 2

Henry James p. 3

Joseph Conrad p. 3

Ford Madox Ford p. 4

Charles Baudelaire p. 6

Henry Bergson p. 6

Virginia Woolf p. 7

Marcel Proust p. 7

T.S. Eliot p. 9

James Joyce p. 12

Homer p. 13

Odissea-Ulysses p. 15

Charles Dickens:

From Bleak House (1853), chapter 1 (In Chancery)

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable

November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the

earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an

elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,

with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the

death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-

hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since

the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those

points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the

river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty)

city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs;

fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges

and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of

their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin;

fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the

bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a

balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey

fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their

time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that

leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation,

Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High

Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the

groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds

this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

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Temple Bar Gateway 1870

Édouard Dujardin:

Da Les lauriers sont coupés (1887)

Un soir de soleil couchant, d’air lointain, de

cieux profonds; et des foules confuses; des bruits,

des ombres, des multitudes; des espaces infiniment

étendus; un vague soir…

Car sous le chaos des apparences, parmi les

durées et les sites, dans l’illusion des choses qui

s’engendrent et qui s’enfantent, un parmi les autres,

un comme les autres, distinct des autres, semblables

aux autres, un le même et un de plus, de l’infini des

possibles existences, je surgis; et voici que le temps

et le lieu se précisent; c’est l’aujourd’hui; c’est l’ici;

l’heure qui sonne; et, autour de moi, la vie; l’heure,

le lieu, un soir d’avril, Paris, un soir clair de soleil

couchant, les monotones bruits, les maisons

blanches, les feuillages d’ombres; le soir plus doux,

et une joie d’être quelq’un, d’aller; les rues et les

mutlitudes, et, dans l’air très lointainement étendu,

le ciel; Paris à l’entour chante, et, dans la brume des

forms inaperçues, mollement il encadre l’idée.

… L’heure a sonné; six heures, l’heure

attendee. Voici la maison où je dois entrer, où je

trouverai quelqu’un; la maison; le vestibule; entrons.

Le soir tombe; l’air est bon; il y a une gaieté dans

l’air. L’escalier; les premiers marches. Si, par

hazard, il était sorti avant l’heure? Cela lui arrive

quelquefois; je veux pourtant lui conter ma journée

d’aujourd’hui. Le palier due premier étage; l’escalier

large et clair; les fenêtres. Je lui ai confié, à ce brave

ami, mon histoire amoureuse. Quelle bonne soirée

encoure j’aurai! Enfin il ne se moquera plus de moi.

Una sera di sole al tramonto, di aria lontana, di cieli

profondi, e folle confuse; rumori, ombre,

moltitudini; spazi estesi all’infinito; una vaga sera…

E sotto il caos delle apparenze, tra le durate

e i luoghi, nell’illusione delle cose che nascono e si

generano, uno tra gli altri, uno stesso e uno in più,

dall’infinito delle esistenze possibili, io sorgo; ed

ecco che il tempo e il luogo si precisano; è l’oggi, è

il qui; l’ora che suona e, attorno a me, la vita; l’ora,

il luogo, una sera d’aprile, Parigi, una sera chiara di

sole al tramonto, i monotoni rumori, le case bianche,

le foglie d’ombra; la sera più dolce, e una gioia di

essere qualcuno, di andare; le strade e le moltitudini,

e nell’aria estesa in lontananza, il cielo; Parigi

intorno canta e, nella bruma delle forme inavvertite,

mollemente incornicia l’idea.

… L’ora è suonata; le sei, l’ora attesa. Ecco la

casa in cui devo entrare, in cui troverò qualcuno; la

casa, l’atrio; entriamo. Viene la sera; l’aria è

piacevole; c’è una gioia nell’aria. Le scale; i primi

gradini. Se, per caso, fosse uscito in anticipo? lo fa

qualche volta; ma io voglio raccontargli la mia

giornata di oggi. Il pianerottolo del primo piano; le

scale ampie e chiare; le finestre. Gli ho confidato, a

questo caro amico, la mia storia d’amore. Che bella

serata trascorrerò! Finalmente non si burlerà più di

me. [trad. Alessandra Solito]

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Henry James:

From “Preface” (Portrait of a Lady, 1888)

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be

reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of

the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size,

hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report

than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they

are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them

stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for

observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every

other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one

seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where

the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of

eyes, the window may not open; "fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The

spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or

slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted

presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is,

and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless

freedom and his "moral" reference.

Joseph Conrad:

From “Preface” (Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897)

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you

feel – it, is before all, to make you see.

Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like

music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle

and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional

atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through

the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or

collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic

aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is

to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to

the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music – which is the art of arts. And it is only

through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an

unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to

plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent

instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless

usage.

From Heart of Darkness (1899)

He was an unshaven little man in a thread-bare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought

him a harmless fool. ‘I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out

there,’ he said. ‘And when they come back too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ he remarked; ‘and,

moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.’

From Lord Jim (1900)

Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them was purely psychological – the expectation of some

essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the

kind could be disclosed.

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My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in

the telling, or rather in the hearing: Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be

eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be

offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions – and safe – and profitable – and dull.

Ford Madox Ford:

From Henry James: A Critical Study (1914)

But nowadays life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous, so small things crave for our attention that it has

become almost impossible to see any pattern in the carpet, the world is so full of a number of things, facts so

innumerable beset us.

From “On Impressionism” (1914)

. . . Indeed, I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many

views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a

backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is

really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

. . . The point is that any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, or verse, or painting, or sculpture, is

the record of the impression of a moment; it is not a sort of rounded, annotated record of a set of

circumstances – it is the record of the recollection in your mind of a set of circumstances that happened ten

years ago – or ten minutes. It might even be the impression of the moment – but it is the impression, not the

corrected chronicle.

. . . Thus an Impressionist in a novel, or in a poem, will never render a long speech of one of his characters

verbatim, because the mind of the reader would at once lose some of the illusion of the good faith of the

narrator. The mind of the reader will say: “Hullo, this fellow is faking this. he cannot possibly remember

such a long speech word for word.” The Impressionist, therefore, will only record his impression of a long

speech.

. . . In that way you would attain to the sort of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have; you would

give your reader the impression that he was witnessing something real, that he was passing through an

experience… You will observe also that you will have produced something that is very like a Futurist picture

– not a Cubist picture – but one of those canvases that show you in one corner a pair of stays, in another a bit

of the foyer of a music-hall, in another a fragment of early morning landscape, and in the middle a pair of

eyes, the whole bearing the title “A Night out”. And indeed, those Futurists are only trying to render on

canvas what Impressionists tel que moi have been trying to render for many years. (You may remember

Emma’s love scene at the cattle show in Madame Bovary).

Do not, I beg you, be led away by the English reviewer’s cant phrase to the effect that the Futurists

are trying to be literary and the plastic arts can never be literary. Les Jeunes of to-day are trying all sorts of

experiments, in all sorts of media. And they are perfectly right to be trying them.

From The Good Soldier (1915)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town

of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as

close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was

possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a

state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I

know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and,

certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

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. . . I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so

elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal

contacts? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all darkness.

From “Collaborating with Conrad” (in The Bodley Head, vol. 5, Memoires and Impressions, London,

The Bodley Head, 1971)

We agreed that a poem was not that which was written in verse but that, either prose or verse, that had

constructive beauty. We agreed that the writing of novels was the one thing of importance that remained to

the world and that what the novel needed was the New Form. We confessed that each of us desired one day

to write Absolute Prose… But that which really brought us together was devotion to Flaubert and

Maupassant.

From “Joseph Conrad: A personal remembrance” (1924)

. . . we saw that life did not narrate but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce

on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions.

From “Techniques” (1935)

. . . It would be idle to say that it was Flaubert who first observed that the intrusion of the author destroyed

the illusion of the reader. Such ideas arise sporadically across the literary landscape and get finally adopted

by one or other of the distinguished though, long before that, they will have been in the air. And Flaubert

more than any of his associates clamoured unceasingly and passionately that the author must be impersonal,

must, like a creating deity, stand neither for nor against any of his characters, must project and never report

and must, above all, forever keep himself out of his books. He must write his books as if he were rendering

the impressions of a person present at a scene; he must remember that a person present at a scene does not

see everything and is above all not able to remember immensely long passages of dialogue.

These dicta were unceasingly discussed by the members of Flaubert’s set who included the

Goncourts, Turgenev, Gautier, Maupassant and, in a lesser degree, Zola and the young James – this last as

disciple of the gentle Russian genius. . . . And in those coenaculae the modern novel – the immensely

powerful engine of our civilization – was born.

. . . Conrad, I may say, was more interested in finding a new form for the novel; I, in training myself to write

just words that would not stick out of a sentence and so distract the reader’s attention by their very justness.

But we worked ceaselessly, together, on those problems, turning from the problem of the new form to that of

the just word as soon as we were mentally exhausted by the one or the other.

That we did succeed eventually in finding a new form I think I may permit myself to claim, Conrad

first evolving the convention of a Marlow who should narrate, in presentation, the whole story of a novel just

as, without such sequence or pursued chronology, a story will come up into the mind of a narrator, and I

eventually dispensing with a narrator buy making the story come up in the mind of the unseen author with a

similar want of chronological sequence. . . .

We evolved then a convention for the novel and one that I think still stands. The novel must be put

into the mouth of a narrator – who must be limited by probability as to what he can know of the affair that he

is adumbrating. Or it must be left to the official Author and he, being almost omnipotent, but, so long as he

limits himself to presenting without comment or moralization, allows himself to be considered to know

almost everything that there is to know. The narration is thus a little more limited in possibilities; the

‘author’s book’ is a little more difficult to handle. A narrator, that is to say, being already a fictional

character, may indulge in any prejudices or wrong-headedness and any likings or dislikes for the other

characters of the book, for he is just a living being like anybody else. But an author-creator, presenting his

narration without passion, may not indulge in the expression of any prejudices or like any one of his

characters more than any other; for, if he displays either of those weaknesses, he will to that extent weaken

the illusion that he was attempted to build up. Marlow, the narrator of Lord Jim, may idolize his hero or

anathemize his villains with the sole result that we say: “How real Marlow is!’ Conrad, however, in

Nostromo must not let any word or preference to Nostromo or Mrs Gould or the daughters of the Garibaldino

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pierce through the surface of his novel or at once we should say: “here is the tiresome person intruding

again,” and at once lose the thread of the tale.

. . . Similarly, in evolving a technique for the presenting of conversation, I – and in this it was rather I than

Conrad, just as in the evolution of the New Form it was rather Conrad than I, though each countersigned the

opinion of the other and thenceforth adopted the device so evolved – I then considered for a long time how

conversations presented themselves to the mind. I would find myself in a room with a gentleman who

pursued an almost uninterrupted monologue. A week after, I would find that of it I retained, verbally, only

his more characteristic expletives – his ‘God bless my soul’s’, or his ‘You don’t mean to say so’s’ and one or

two short direct speeches: “If the Government goes to the country, I will bet a hundredweight of China tea to

a Maltese orange that they will have a fifty-eight to forty-two majority of voters against them.” But I

remembered the whole gist of his remarks.

And so, considering that an author-narrator, being supposed to have about the mnemonic powers of a

man with a fair memory, will after the elapse of a certain period, be supposed to retain about that much of a

conversation that the Reader may suppose to have heard, I shall, when inventing conversations, give about

just that proportion of direct and indirect speech, in which latter I shall present the gist of my character’s

argument…

From The Good Soldier (1915)

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of

Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close

as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was

possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a

state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I

know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and,

certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so

elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal

contacts? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all darkness.

Charles Baudelaire:

Le spleen de Paris (1867-69)

Who of us has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of poetic prose, musical without rhythm

and without rhythm, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines

of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience? (trans. Arthur Symons, 1913)

Henri Bergson:

From Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) (translated into English in 1910 with the title

of Time and Free Will)

Below homogeneous .duration, which is the extensive symbol of true duration, conscious life. A close

psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate one another; below

the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined

states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole.

But we are generally content with the first, i.e. with the shadow of the self projected into homogeneous

space. Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or

perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is

much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness

prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.

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Virginia Woolf:

Form The Moment: Summer’s Night (1929)

. . . what composed the present moment?… it is largely composed of visual and of sense impressions… but

this moment is also composed of a sense that the legs of a chair are sinking through the centre of the earth,

passing through the rich garden earth; they sink, weighted down. Then the sky loses its colour perceptibly

and a star here and there makes a point of light. Then changes, unseen in the day, coming in succession seem

to make an order evident. One becomes aware that we are spectators and also passive participants in a

pageant. And as nothing can interfere with the order, we have nothing to do but accept, and watch… It is

time to light the lamp, the farmers’ wives are saying: can I see a little longer? The lamp sinks down; then it

burns up. All doubt is over. Yes the time has come in all cottages, in all farms, to light the lamps. This then

the movement is laced about with these weavings to and fro, these inevitable downsinkings, flights, lamp

lightings.

But that is the wider circumference of the moment. Here in the centre is a knot of consciousness; a

nucleus divided up into four heads, eight legs, eight arms, and four separate bodies. They are not subject to

the law of the sun and the owl and the lamp. They assist it. For sometimes a hand rests on the table;

sometimes a leg is thrown over a leg. Now the moment becomes shot with the extraordinary arrow which

people let fly from their mouths – when they speak…

From To the Lighthouse (1927)

Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew

with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit… to her

pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the

same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive.

That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.

. . . Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the

candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round the table, for the night

was now shut off by the panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world,

rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection

in which things wavered and vanished, waterly.

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all

conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against the fluidity

out there.

. . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and

shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the

fleeting, the spectral, lie a ruby; so that again to-night she had the feeling she had had once to-day already, of

peace, or rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would

remain.

Marcel Proust:

From Du côté de chez Swann (1913; M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1 Swann’s Way, trans.

C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

. . . It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it [our own past]: all the efforts of our intellect must

prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material

object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that

object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre

and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home,

my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first,

and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes

called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s

shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to

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my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and

the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the

extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual,

detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me,

its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has

of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to

feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious

that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not,

indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon

and define it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me

rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my

quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand,

and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot

interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact

and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to

discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has

strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go

seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with

something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can

bring into the light of day.

And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought

with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in

whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I

retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state,

illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again

the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every

extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And

then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change

to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before

the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position

before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me,

something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor

at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I

can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual

memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are

too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the

uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one

possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of

cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my

past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment

which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of

the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down

again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the

task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult

enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think

merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over

without effort or distress of mind.

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on

Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went

to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of

real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;

perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-

cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among

9

others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now

survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so

richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have

lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But

when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and

scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful,

the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for

their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of

their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-

flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery

of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room

was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which

had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I

could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was

sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was

fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it

little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet,

stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people,

permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the

water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church

and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into

being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.

T.S. Eliot:

From “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923)

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr.

Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of

ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility which is contemporary

history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr Yeats to have

been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious.

Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and the Golden

Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible only few years ago. Instead of narrative

method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern

world possible for art.

10

From The Waste Land

Not only the title, but the plan and the good deal of

the incidental symbolism of the poem were

suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the

grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).

Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s

book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much

better than my notes can do; and I recommend it

(apart from the great interest of the book itself) to

any who think such elucidation of the poem worth

the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am

indebted in general, one which has influenced our

generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I

have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis,

Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works

will immediately recognize in the poem certain

references to vegetation ceremonies.…Cum Iunone

‘iocos et maior vestra profecto est

Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’

Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti

Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.

Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva

Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu

Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem

Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem

Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae,’

Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,

Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem

Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.

Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa

Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto

Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique

Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,

At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita

cuiquam

Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto

Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.320-38

… with Juno, said ‘You gain more than we do from

the pleasures of love.’ She denied it. They agreed to

ask learned Tiresias for his opinion. He had known

Venus in both ways.

Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two

large snakes mating in the green forest, and,

marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a

woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the

eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said

‘Since there is such power in plaguing you that it

changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I

will strike you again, now.’ He struck the snakes and

regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he

was born with.

As the arbiter of the light-hearted dispute he

confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturnia, it is said, was

more deeply upset than was justified and than the

dispute warranted, and damned the one who had

made the judgement to eternal night. But, since no

god has the right to void what another god has done,

the all-powerful father of the gods gave Tiresias

knowledge of the future, in exchange for his lost

sight, and lightened the punishment with honour.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tr. Anthony S. Kline

From “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (in The Sacred Wood, 1920)

What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure a consciousness of the past and that he

should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender

of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a

continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. … It is in this depersonalization that art may be

said to approach the condition of science.

… the mind of the mature poet differs from the mind of the immature one not precisely in any valuation on

‘personality’, not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say’, but rather by being a more

finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new

combinations.

The analogy was that of a catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the

presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the

platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself

is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of

11

platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect

the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the

more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are his material. … The poet’s mind is

in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until

all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

… The business of the poet is not find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up

into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. All emotions which he has never

experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion

recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. … Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape

from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only

those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. … But

every few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and

not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.

Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first

place, the historical sense … and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the

past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in

his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of

the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This

historical sense … is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most

acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the

new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;

for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly

altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this

is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of

European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as

much as the present is directed by the past.

From “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919)

… Shakespeare’s Hamlet … is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and …

Shakespeare was unable to impose his motive successfully upon the ‘intractable’ material of the play. … the

play is most certainly a failure. … It is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other

words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;

such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is

immediately evoked.

The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely

what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it

is in excess of the facts as they appear.

From “The Metaphysical Poets” (in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1921)

… something … had happened between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of

Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson

and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a

rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

12

… When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate

experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads

Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or

the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

James Joyce:

From Stephen Hero (1944)

By an epiphany he meant the sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture

or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to

approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and

sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship

of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother. (chapter 2)

. . . He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of

hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering

whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed

the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew

dim. The yellow gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an

altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in

another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring against his bosom in a tumult. A

young woman dressed in a long pink gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face.

She said gaily:

—Good night, Willie dear! (chapter 2)

III . . .“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland,

or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I

can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning… I do not fear to

be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a

mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

IV. . . 26 Apr.: “Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I

may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be

it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the

smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 27 Apr.: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and

ever in good stead” (chapter 5).

Letter to Carlo Linati (21 September 1921)

È l’epopea di due razze (Israele-Irlanda) e nel medesimo tempo il ciclo del corpo umano ed anche la

storiella d’una giornata (vita). La figura di Ulisse mi ha sempre affascinato sin da ragazzo. Cominciai a

scrivere una novella per Dubliners 15 anni fa ma smisi. Sette anni, lavoro ora a questo libro – accidenti! È

una specie di enciclopedia, anche. La mia intenzione è di rendere il mito sub specie temporis nostri; non

soltanto ma permettendo che ogni avventura (cioè, ogni ora, ogni organo, ogni arto connessi e immedesimati

nello schema somatico del tutto) condizionasse anzi creasse la propria tecnica. Ogni avventura è per così dire

una persona benché composta di persone – come favella l’Aquinate degli angelici eserciti.

13

Homer: Odyssey 4.351-570

[351] I spoke, and the lovely goddess quickly answered: “Stranger, I will tell you truthfully all you ask. This

is the haunt of the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus of Egypt, immortal seer, who knows all the ocean depths, and

serves Poseidon. They say he is my true father. If you could lie in wait and trap him somehow, he will give

you the course, and duration, and say how you may return over the teeming sea. And if you wish it so,

favoured of Zeus, he will tell you the good and evil done in your house while you have been on your long

and troubled passage.”

At this, I said: “Find me a way to lie in wait for this ancient god in case he sees me first, and avoids me. It is

hard for a mortal man to defeat a god.”’

[398] ‘She replied: “Stranger, I will tell you truthfully all you ask. When the sun is at the zenith, the wise Old

Man of the Sea emerges from the brine, masked by the dark wave, while the west wind blows. Once risen, he

lies down and sleeps in an echoing cave, and the seals, the daughter of the sea’s children, slithering from the

grey water, lie down around him in a slumbering herd, breathing out the pungent odour of the deep. Choose

three of your friends, the best you have in the oared ships, and at dawn I’ll lead you there and place you

among their ranks. Let me tell you the old sorcerer’s tricks. First he will go round counting the seals, and

when he has looked them over, and tallied them in fives, he will lie down among them like a shepherd with

his flock. When you see him settled, summon your strength and courage, and grasp him, however hard he

struggles and tries to escape. Try he will, taking on the forms of everything on earth, of water and glorious

blazing fire. But hold him bravely and grip him all the tighter. When he is finally willing to speak, and

assumes the original shape in which you saw him resting, and questions you, then cease your violence, set

the old man free, brave hero, and ask what god it is you have angered, and how you might return over the

teeming waves.”

With that she plunged beneath the surge, and I went to where my ship lay on the shore, and my mind was

filled with dark thoughts as I went. Then, when I had reached the ships and the waves, and we had prepared

our supper, and deathless night descended, we lay down to sleep at the water’s edge. And as soon as rosy-

fingered Dawn appeared, I walked along the shore of the wide seaway, praying devoutly to the gods: and

three of my friends, on whom I could most rely, went with me.

She, meanwhile, plunging beneath the sea’s wide back, brought four sealskins up from the deep, freshly

flayed, and plotted her father’s capture. She scooped out hiding places for us in the dunes, and sat there

waiting: then, when we arrived, she made us lie in a row, and threw a seal skin over each. Our waiting would

have been dreadful, so dreadful was the stench of the briny seals. Who would want to sleep with a beast from

the sea? But her gift saved us: she applied ambrosia to each man’s nostrils, and its sublime fragrance killed

the stench. There we waited, patiently, all morning, and herds of seals came up from the sea. They lay down

in rows along the beach, and at noon the old man emerged and found the sleek ranks. He looked them over,

and tallied them, and not expecting our deceit, counted us among the first. Then he lay down to sleep. With a

shout we rushed at him, and grappled him, but he forgot none of his crafty tricks. First he turned to a bearded

lion, then a snake, and a leopard: then a giant boar: then he became rushing water, then a vast leafy tree: but

we held tight with unyielding courage. When at last that old man, expert in magic arts, grew tired, he spoke

to me, saying: “Son of Atreus, which of the gods told you to lie in wait for me, and hold me against my will?

What is it you wish?”’

[464] ‘At this, I answered: “Old man, why prevaricate, you know how long I have been penned in this isle,

with no sign of an end to it, and how I lose heart. Tell me, since you gods know everything, which of the

immortals holds me here, hindering my passage, and tell me how to return over the teeming sea.”

He replied at once: “Surely you should have made rich sacrifice to Zeus and the other gods before you left,

so as to return home faster, crossing the wine-dark sea. It is not your fate to reach your native land, and see

your fine house and friends again, until you have sailed the waters of the Nile once more, Aegyptus, the

heaven-fed river, and made holy offerings to the deathless gods who hold the wide heavens. Then, at last, the

gods will let you return as you wish.”

At this my spirits fell, since he directed me to sail the long and weary way over the misty deep to Aegyptus.

Even so I answered: “I will do all this, old man, as you suggest. But tell me this, in truth. Have all the

Achaeans whom Nestor and I left behind, as we sailed from Troy, reached home in safety with their ships?

Or have any died a wretched death at sea, or in the arms of friends, though the war was over?”

“Son of Atreus”, he replied swiftly, “why do you ask me this? There is no benefit to you in knowing what I

14

know, and when you have heard the truth, your tears will not be long in flowing. Many were killed, many

were spared: yet only two of the bronze-clad Achaeans were lost on the homeward journey, and as for the

fighting you were there. And a third I think is alive still, but a prisoner somewhere on the wide seas.

Ajax the Lesser, first, was lost, with his long-oared ships. Poseidon wrecked him on the great cliffs of Gyrae,

but rescued him from the waves. He would have avoided death, regardless of Athene’s hatred, if he had not

boasted blindly. He claimed he had escaped the sea’s vast gulf despite the gods, and Poseidon heard his

boast. Seizing his trident in his mighty hands the god struck the rock of Gyrae and split it apart. One part

stood firm, but the shattered half, where Ajax had crouched when his judgement was blinded, toppled into

the sea, and drove him down into the vast surging tide. So he drank the salt waves, and died.”’

[512] ‘“But your brother escaped that fate, and slipped by with his hollow ships, protected by Lady Hera.

Yet, as he neared the heights of Cape Malea, a tempest caught him and drove him, groaning deeply, over the

teeming waves, to the edge of that land where Thyestes once ruled, and at that time his son Aegisthus. But

there the gods altered the wind’s course: a fair breeze blew and showed him the safe path home. Agamemnon

was overjoyed to set foot again on his native soil, lying down he kissed the ground, and the tears streamed

from his eyes, at the sight of his own land. Now a lookout saw him from the watchtower, a man appointed by

cunning Aegisthus, who had promised him two golden talents. There he had watched for a year, fearful lest

Agamemnon should pass unnoticed, and employ his strength in swift anger. He ran to the palace to carry his

news to the usurper, and Aegisthus at once devised an ambush. He picked twenty of his best men, who lay in

wait in the palace, while he ordered a feast prepared on the far side of the hall. Then, his mind plotting

murder, he set out in his chariot to welcome Agamemnon, shepherd of the people, and drew him

unsuspecting to his doom. When he had feasted him, he killed him, like an ox felled at the manger. And none

of the followers of Atreus’ son were spared, and none of Aegisthus’ men, but all were killed in the palace.”

At this my heart was broken, and I fell to the sands and wept. I no longer wished to live, to see the sun. But

when I was weary of weeping and clutching the ground, the wise Old Man of the Sea said: “Son of Atreus,

enough of this endless grieving that gains you nothing. Better to head for your native land as fast as you can,

and you will either find Aegisthus still alive, or Orestes will have killed him ahead of you, and you can join

the funeral rites.”’

[548] ‘My spirits rose and my heart was comforted by this, despite my sorrow, and I spoke to him with

winged words: “I know now about these two, but what of the third? Name the man who still lives somewhere

in the wide sea: or is he too dead? Despite the pain, I wish to know.”

I spoke, and he at once replied, saying: “He is Odysseus, Laertes’ son, whose home is on Ithaca. I saw him

shedding great tears in the island haunt of the Nymph Calypso, who keeps him captive there, far from his

native land, since he has no oared ship, no crew, to carry him over the wide waters. But because you are

Helen’s husband, and therefore the son-in-law of Zeus, it is not ordained that you, Menelaus, favoured by

Zeus, should meet your end in Argos, the horse-pasture. Instead the immortals will bear you to the Elysian

Fields, at the world’s end, where yellow-haired Radamanthus dwells, and existence is best for men. There is

no snow there, no rain, or fierce storms: rather Ocean brings singing breaths of the West Wind, to refresh

them.”

With this, he sank into the billowing sea…

[tr. Anthony S. Kline]

15

Odissea

1 – 4 1 Telemachia: Concilio degli dèi. Zeus manda Atena, sotto le spoglie di Mentore, da

Telemaco per convincerlo a reagire ai Proci che corteggiano Penelope e ad andare alla

ricerca di notizie sul padre.

2 Telemachia: Telemaco, Penelope e i Proci

3 Telemachia: Telemaco a Pilo da Nestore, che gli racconta l’uccisione di Agamennone e

la vendetta di Oreste su Egisto (come esempio morale – non insiste su Clitennestra: la

vendetta dev’essere orientata contro i Proci e non riguarda Penelope)

4 Telemachia: Telemaco a Sparta da Menelao (ed Elena). Racconto di Menelao di ciò

che ha saputo dal Vecchio Del Mare [Proteo] – anche qui si ricorda la vendetta di

Oreste su Egisto. A Sparta ritroveremo Telemaco nel canto 15.

5 Calipso (Ulisse se ne va dall'isola di Calipso (Ogigia), ma la sua zattera fa naufragio)

6-13.95 Nell’isola dei Feaci (Scheria)

6 Ulisse approda a Scheria, incontra la figlia del re (Nausicaa) e viene da lei portato alla

reggia

7 Arrivo di Ulisse e Nausicaa alla rocca del re Alcinoo. I Feaci accolgono Ulisse. Descri-

zione dell’isola beata, dove si hanno due raccolti l’anno e il lavoro è svolto da automi.

8 I tre canti dell’aedo di corte (il cieco Demodoco): (a) la contesa fra Ulisse e Achille,

provocata da Agamennone; (b) gli amori di Ares e Afrodite; (c) la presa di Troia con

l’inganno del cavallo – fin qui Ulisse non si è fatto riconoscere

9 Ulisse si dichiara e comincia a raccontare al re Alcinoo varie avventure, fra le quali il

Ciclope

10 Ulisse racconta: l’isola di Eolo; l’incontro con Circe

11 Ulisse racconta: lascia Circe e va coi compagni ai confini dell’Oceano; discesa agli

Inferie incontri: con la madre, con gli eroi e le eroine del mito

12 Ulisse racconta: ritorno e commiato definitivo da Circe; altre avventure (le vacche del

Sole, Scilla e Cariddi); deriva fino all’isola di Calipso – il racconto si ricongiunge

all’inizio del canto V

13.1-95 Alcinoo, re dei Feaci, concede a Ulisse una nave che lo riporti a Itaca

13.96-24 Itaca

14 Ulisse si presenta come un Cretese che ha combattuto a Troia e ha conosciuto Ulisse

15 Atena va a Sparta per far tornare Telemaco a Itaca

16 Ulisse incontra il porcaro Eumeo, Telemaco di ritorno da Sparta e il padre Laerte. Si

rivela solo a Telemaco.

17 Telemaco racconta a Penelope quello che ha saputo da Nestore e da Menelao. Ulisse

viene maltrattato da un pastore. Eumeo lo accompagna alla reggia, dove il suo vecchio

cane Argo lo riconosce. Incontro coi Proci e maltrattamenti da parte di qesti. Primo

incontro con Penelope.

18 Ulisse, che elemosina il cibo, si deve confrontare con Iro, un altro mendicante e lo

batte. Altro scherno da parte dei Proci.

19 Incontro con Penelope, sempre in incognito. L’ancella Euriclea riconosce Ulisse dalla

cicatrice.

20 Preparativi alla reggia per la festa di Apollo. I Proci ricevono presagi funesti. Intesa fra

Ulisse e Telemaco, in vista dell’azione.

21 La sfida dell’arco

22 Strage dei Proci

23 Ulisse si fa riconoscere da Penelope

24 Ulisse e Telemaco lasciano Itaca; nuova discesa agli Inferi; ritorno a Itaca e

pacificazione coi notabili del regno

1-4: ordine cronologico (Telemachia)

5: ordine cronologico (Calipso)

6-8: ordine cronologico (primi due giorni di Ulisse presso i Feaci)

9-12: analessi

13.1-95: ordine cronologico (partenza dai Feaci e viaggio)

13.96 - 24 (fine): ordine cronologico

16

Ulysses

The Telemachiad

1 – 3

1 Telemachus (Sandycove, Martello Tower)

2 Nestor (Mr Deasy’s school)

3 Proteus (Sandymount strand)

The Odyssey

4-15

4 Calypso (Bloom’s home, at the butcher’s)

5 Lotus Eaters (at the post office, at the chemist, towards the baths)

6 Hades (the funeral)

7 Aeoulus (at the journal’s offices)

8 Lestrygonians (at the restaurant and pub)

9 Scylla and Charybdis (the national library)

10 Wandering Rocks (through the streets of Dublin)

11 Sirens (restaurant at a hotel)

12 Cyclops (pub)

13 Nausicaa (Sandymount strand)

14 Oxen of the Sun (maternity hospital, pub)

15 Circe (the brothel)

The Nostos 16 Eumaeus (the cabman’s shelter)

17 Ithaca (Bloom’s home)

18 Penelope (Molly in bed)