Podcast: A taster of Ulysses

“It has made me better loving you… it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of  A Lady by Henry James

The book is a painted portrait or even a kaleidoscope.  We watch and guess what Isabel will do. But like a portrait, she is (perhaps) caught in a frame and frozen by the artistry –or the terms of her world.

Previous studies have included considerations of gender roles, the negotiated space between self and other, the corruption or freedom offered by privilege, the challenge of looking at nationalities in generalizations (and the tempting ease to do so), the ways in which humans reveal themselves…these Salon discussions are full of wonder: the meeting of the gathered minds and the provoking text is a powerful thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to echo in the lines and characters of Henry James, Isabel in particular: “You think of me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance…I—this thought which is called I, –is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.” –from Emerson’s essay The Transcendentalist 

Our study of PoAL may include a consideration of this quote in light of Isabel’s life and choices: how much do we make ourselves? How does the world impose itself on the individual in the act of self-creation?

Salon Details and Registration

• Seven weeks  : November 3rd- December 15th  2020
• ZOOM Virtual Study
• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost £165 includes notes and critical resources
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: Norton Critical Edition Oct. 2017; ISBN-10: 0393938530

To register for the Salon study, please use the Paypal button below to pay £165:  Please ensure that the email that is connected to your Paypal account is the same email that you use for  correspondence

 

From J. Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

“The question (could a novel be art) were…framed in terms of technique, but the ideal was no longer just to promote the novel’s ability to communicate more and more details about more and more things, but also to have an aesthetic shape or effect that would be intended by the author and felt by the reader as consciously graceful, beautiful or ‘right.’  Foremost proponent of these ideas was Henry James…” p. 134

“Everything that Isabel has learned about love and marriage growing up in the United States turns out to be wrong—in Europe, marriage is a pure commodity relationship, and it is the fate girls to be bought, sold, and dominated. Their only choices are to accept their fate knowingly or undergo it without understanding it. ..In Pofa Lady James does what he intended to do…uses intense psychological analysis and careful depiction of settings to fill the spots where the vulgar might have been. “ p. 135

“H. James …recognized that, as vital and satisfying as the English novel was, English novels were missing something that French novels possessed—psychological refinement and depth. …HJ wanted to write…important novels about the progress of the inner life, in which the climax might be only a silent recognition by the protagonist that she has made a commitment fatal to her happiness. Readers had to be educated to understand the weight of such subterranean drama…” p.136

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Richard Wright, a fellow Harlem Renaissance writer and critic of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God wrote that her work was not political enough, saying:

“Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.”

Wow.  That’s crushing.

But in the 1970s, the novel, half bildungsroman and half romance, was reclaimed by Alice Walker and a generation of feminists who insisted that the personal is political.  While not a book about politics and race, it can be proposed that Janie’s emancipation involves politics and race.  Zadie Smith writes in the forward:

“It is about the discovery of self in and through another.  It suggests that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being.”

The world of the American South at the turn of the century, particularly Eatonville, Georgia, the first all-Black incorporated town in America, offers a place where Hurston can pay homage to the humour and inventiveness of local language, placing great value on how people express themselves, the folk experience.  In Janie’s telling of her own self-discovery and self-determination, we can find imbedded a sexual awakening, folkloric themes and vernacular speech—a rhetoric of authenticity—and the arguments of early feminists. In her quest, Janie experiences different husbands and different communities—travels “to the horizon and back”—in order to tell her own story as a spiritual journey from wealth to power to love.

SALON DETAILS 

Hurston’s focus on the Black community, her centring of Black cultural experience and characters may be seen as resistance to the narratives of Black people reacting to racism. Hurston’s narrative shows the effects of racial inequality, but the story concentrates on Black relationships, work, story-telling, intimacy and cultural experience. This is a celebration that opens the reader’s understanding beyond social protest writing. There are aspects of the writing that the reader has to situate in the time setting: the use of dialect, for example, can be seen as challenging or authentic to the cultural world of the novel.

Few novels of the time centred around a woman speaking for herself in an attempt to understand her own life.  Our discussion will include consideration of desire and love in a society that is bent on the stifling of women and reflections on how the concerns of this story have descended into our contemporary age: what does it mean to be a self-determinate being in our age?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…

 Of all kinds of reading, we are apparently least likely to reach instinctively for poetry.  Perhaps we had less than happy experiences as teenagers, force-fed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Maybe we are daunted by the perceived difficulty of the form, with its elusive meanings, and feel that it is a pleasure restricted to an elite few. This salon welcomes those of us who have read little poetry and enjoyed less, as well as those for whom poetry is a welcome friend.

The word sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto, a little song. By the 13th century it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme, usually reflecting upon a single sentiment, and with a clarification or ‘turn’ of thought in its concluding lines. There were many sonneteers in several languages but it was the Earl of Surrey who developed the rhyme scheme – ABAB CDCD EFEF GG – that came to be used by the most famous practitioner of the form, William Shakespeare. His collection of 154 sonnets was first published in 1609.

A Shakespearean sonnet is a usefully compact addition to anyone’s mental library and, in this study, each participant will choose one from a selected list. There is no need to have memorised your chosen sonnet – although you may find you want to by the end of our evening.

Using a few simple exercises, we will spend time with our own sonnet and with each other’s choices. The purpose is not to challenge Sir Ian McKellen in performance achievement, but to have the experience of living inside these beautiful words and lifting them off the page.

Salon details

• Facilitated by Jane Wymark
• One meeting study from 6 To 8 PM (GMT) on 23rd November
• VIRTUAL meeting on Zoom
• No preparation required
• Recommended Sonnets and further details will be emailed upon registration
• Cost: 20£ for two-hour study (first-time Salon participants eligible for a discount)

*This study is now full– please contact us to be advised of a second Sonnet study*

Please use the Paypal button below to register by paying £20 for the one-meeting study- if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer, please contact us for details. Upon payment, you will receive opening notes and further information.

SONNET 23

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharg’d with burden of mine own love’s might.
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone;
she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first—‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism—all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Salon Director
• Four-meeting study starting Nov 25th running through Dec. 16th Wednesday early evenings
• Virtual Meeting on Zoom
• Cost £115 includes notes and critical resources *reduced cost available for first-time participants* 
• Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

Please use the Paypal button below to register by paying £115 for the four-meeting study- if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer, please contact us for details. Upon payment, you will receive opening notes and further information.

***THIS SALON IS NOW FULL**  please contact us if you are interested in being on the wait-list or for a future study 


 

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and questing minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality—and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet—a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier… What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”