| HJS |
| volume 3, issue 2, 2003 |
| NOTES 1. Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young James Joyce (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 50. Most of Chapter II ("The Influence of Joyce's Reading," 32-71), is devoted only to Taxil, namely 49-71. This book is actually about Joyce's early literary activity, not about Ulysses, but Magalaner works the Taxil material in with the idea that it shows how early (winter/spring 1903, age 20/21) Joyce began holding tightly onto bits of ideas for subsequent artistic employment when the right context showed up. 2. Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 125-26; cf. Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882-1915 (London: Kyle Cathie Limited, 1992), 201-03, where however a few details may be a bit loosely stated or garbled (cp. the Ellmann passage on the Caseys/Egans). 3. Ellmann, JJ (1982), 119-20, 128. Perhaps the first Paris trip is a possibility as well, though that less than three-week December stay was largely taken up with Joyce's learning his way around Paris, plus arranging and then abandoning medical studies (Ellmann, 109, 112, 116). It seems more likely that Joyce's discussions with the young free-thinking French-army soldier Patrice Casey would have taken place within one relatively small window of time (i.e., when Patrice was on furlough from the army), most likely somewhere between late January and early April. 4. Magalaner mentions (64) that 1907 obituaries would be important, but is not sure which one(s) Joyce might possibly have seen. 5. P.d.S. (as Joyce often abbreviated it in correspondence) is the newspaper most frequently mentioned in his letters from 1906-07, and in Joyce biographies. In the letters it first comes up in the P.S. of a letter to brother Stannie in Trieste, barely two weeks after Joyce and Nora's arrival in Rome. Joyce suggests any interesting P.d.S. clipping(s) be sent along as enclosures (Letters II, 152; 19 August 1906). That is, Joyce had already become a reader of P.d.S. between his early-1905 arrival in Trieste and July 1906, and was apparently suffering a bit from journalistic withdrawal after moving to Rome. 6. Taxil's theory of religion follows Comte in likewise presenting itself as the final culmination of three stages of putatively increasing rationality; cf. Comte's theological, metaphysical, and positivist stages. 7. Though Joseph is at times rather silly in Vie, he is other things in addition to "simple-minded" (154), as Fritz Senn says in "Taxilonomy," James Joyce Quarterly 19.2 (Winter 1982), 154-58. Joseph is often quite self-seeking and canny in Chapters III and V. He is silly in taking the young angel "Gabriel" at face value, but is led to this by his culture's religious beliefs. He takes Mary back out of a combination of selfishness (not wanting to let his chance at fame escape) and credulity (on the subject of angels and prophecy). 8. Perhaps not irrelevantly, Paraclete (the early-Christian Greek-language term for the Holy Spirit) is Greek for "person or thing called in" (to help). 9. Any edition of Joyce's Stephen Hero, 141 (as also cited in Magalaner, 56). 10. Magalaner, 52-58, discusses, in connection with Bloom and Molly's sexual and reproductive problems, the three Taxil-alluding passages in Ulysses (3.158-73, 4.301-12, and 15.2577-85). He also brings to bear on this the En ventre sa mere conversation (episode 12, "Cyclops") about these possible problems, which again has a French phrase. Magalaner also connects all of this to the book's Don Giovanni theme as well, and even sees this whole cluster of allusion as an indirect suggestion that Bloom is not Rudy's father (56), though the text of Ulysses itself does not push the parallels that far. 11. As Senn pointed out, 154. The Marie/Marion proportion may or may not change after Chapter V of Vie, but the opening passage down through the end of Chapter V is the one we can be fairly sure Joyce knew, and nine of the seventeen occurrences of Marion in Chapters III through V actually occur in Chapter V, from which the C'est le pigeon phrase, and the question to which it answers, are in fact taken. 12. Magalaner, 54, sees the Marie/Joseph/Gabriel (or, "Holy Spirit") triangle as paralleled by the Molly/Bloom/Boylan triangle. 13. See note 1. 14. Magalaner, 63. 15. Magalaner, 62. 16. Magalaner, 64. 17. Magalaner's fairly extensive comments on Joyce's possible association of Taxil with antisemitism and anti-antisemitism (64-68), are largely based on Taxil's very public polemics with an antisemitic politician and journalist at the turn from the 1880's to the 1890's. Dumont attacked the (then-Catholic) polemicist Taxil as a Jew, and Taxil defended himself as a Catholic and counterattacked Dumont as both antisemitic and anticatholic. Magalaner believes this links up especially well with the anti-Bloom antisemitism of the bargoers in episode 12 ("Cyclops"). 18. Senn, 156. Senn also notes that the Panther reappears in episode 15 ("Circe") right after the two Philips, Drunk and Sober, recall (in Stephen's mind) the Joseph/Marie question and answer from Taxil about the pregnancy and the pigeon. Senn also notes that Stephen thinks of the dream-panther in "Proteus" (episode 3), the episode in which the Taxil tag first arises in his mind that day. 19. Senn, 155-56. 20. Magalaner, 59. 21. Magalaner, 70. |