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Joyce, Woolf and Shakespeare: The death of Queen Elizabeth's physician Lopez, executed on grounds of conspiring to assassinate the queen, provided an outburst of anti-Semitism in the Elizabethans and a rash of plays (Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice) if two plays can constitute a rash. Shakespeare's offering was not truly a success because of his ambivalence in his depiction of Shylock who emerges in many parts of the play as a sympathetic and even noble figure. Something of the same thing happens with Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He too is not altogether unsympathetic and Shakespeare's treatment of him tends to throw the play out of whack. None of his villains in fact are really lacking some touch of quality that we can admire and relate to. The early works of Virginia Woolf are eccentric but not particularly marking out the direction that she eventually took. She was already set on the course that she would eventually pursue before she could have been acquainted with the works of Joyce but it is interesting to note that her development as a writer had a sharp upturn at about the time that Joyce's serialized Ulysses began to appear. It is impossible to assert that there was a direct influence and Woolf was idiosyncratically different from everyone but I am suspicious of coincidences. Her reaction - and this was not limited to Woolf - was that of a member of a superior class to a writer that she perceived to be of a lower class than herself. She was not a prude but she may have been a snob. Bob Williams Bob, Bod, Rasik My nice computer broke down yesterday, I am writing this on an old mac, and there is a queue behind me to use it. So, of necessity this mail is going to be short. I reread all your interestin mails. About Shylock's creation being racist: one has to consider the time in which it was written, I feel. As Bob said (this factwas new to me) if this was written in such a time it would explain why Shakespeare wrote that kind of a character. Perhaps we should also not judge all these things from today's point of view. God forbid, I am not condoning any kind of racist feelings, but have to accept that such feelings were/are very prevalent. About Virgina Woolf's writing: I have to check when she gave the talk, "A room of one's own". That is one of the books which has influenced me a lot. I think that her concerns were very different compared to Joyce's. So, if she did not understand /care to understand Joyce's Ulysses, that is not very surprising. If I may be honest, if I was not aware of Ulysses being regarded as the best (one of the) literary pieces of the 20th century, would I be reading it with such interest? Am I not too easily influened by others' judgement? Would I not have abandoned it thinking it has no structure, no... because it is quite difficult to understand unless one (re)reads every sentence. Particularly if I had started reading Joyce with Ulysses? Do I shock you people? Chandra The point about Shakespeare was that his heart was not in the creation of the Jew as Villain and that's why Shylock is so mixed a character - like many of Shakespeare's villains but more than most. After the Holocaust is an entirely new world for most of us. Things that we could have passed over become things to be fought. Joyce was an early recruit in the battle although not always a consistent one. We can cut Woolf the same kind of slack that we cut Joyce. If he was not always consistent, neither was she and their inconsistency had little affect on the quality of their achievments. Ulysses - and Joyce too for that matter - is not everyone's choice although the sales figures for Ulysses are rather staggering. Every year the sales are phenomenal for so old a book. This is why the publisher is trying to hold on to the rights for another few years and is willing to incur expensive litigation costs to do so. Popularity is no guarantee of literary quality and Ulysses is not - as so many insist - the preserve of word drunk academics. This makes it a difficult work to assess. Most frequent readers would agree, I think, that the book is indefinitely rereadable and that its distinctive flavor becomes apparent only after prolonged exposure. This indicates an amount of labor that a certain type of reader cannot provide. The attacks on the book, and they are many, largely come from such readers. As a convicted addict, I can't deal objectively with the question of the absolute value of Ulysses. Best Bob Chandra and Bob: Just a quick response offhand: That 'The Merchant of Venice' is a racist work, I have no doubt. For the moment I just want to quote some opening lines on that play from Haold Bloom's new book on Shakepeare, called 'Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human': "one would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to reacognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work. Yet every time I have taught the play, many of my most sensitive and intelligent students become very unhappy when I begin with that observation...." Bloom goes on to write a long commentary which we need not go into for now, anyway, but perhaps worth reading in that it qualifies the judgemental, simplistic sounding first line. Yes, Chandra,,one would have to be thinking of the time Shakespeare wrote in nad the prevalent historic anti-semoticism of Europe. Shakespeare is gartituously racist in his treatmnet of dark people, the 'savage', etc. in Othello, The Tempest and other works. On Virginia Woolf and Joyce -- I used to be a memeber of one of the Virginia Woolf discussion groups on the net and we had endless discussions on Woolf's envy and jealousy of Joyce. It seems Ulysses was published just prior to the time Woolf herself was experimenting with 'steam of consciousness' writing, particularly I think in Mrs. Dalloway and felt outstepped by Joyce. A number of quotes from her diaries and so forth clearly demonstrate her jealousy, such as trhe one I mentioned earlier about Joyce reminding her of an adoloscent pageboy scratching the pimples on his face. In fairness, Woolf is, no doubt, a major talent and a great writer in her own right and has to be judged in the context of being unfortunate in timing her own work. Bob you rightly pointed out the class conscious nature of Woolf's attitude to poor plebian Joyce from 'dear, dirty' Dublin. My own main point really has to do with the choice of Bloom as hero, an ordinary citizen of Dublin, Jewish, whom Joyce chose as the major protagonist of his work and portrayed him not in the melodramatic/negative style of Shylock, but as ordinary and commonplace, yet profoundly human, no stereotype. The whole question of Shakespeare as unchallengable icon and beyond any serious criticism has been discussed interestingly by people like George Steiner in the context of discussing some notes from the diary of Wittgenstein. The question of Joyce's sympathetic rendering of Leopold Bloom becomes more interesting in the context of a good deal of hostility to Joyce that I perceive, rightly or wrongly, in the ango-saxon world. In the solid 'anglo' institutions of learning Joyce is often simply ignored, an age-old device for dealing with someone not liked. -- Rasik Shah |