Word: dedalus
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...voice to emerge naturally out of the biographical narrative. Whenever Kaplan does choose to intervene, he enhances his portrait with appropriate comparisions, or soft-spoken but astute analysis. In one case, Kaplan contrasts a friendship between Whitman and an intimate acquaintance, Peter Doyle, to Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the cabmen's shelter in Ulysses, and Nathanial West's own "Peter Doyle" holding hands with Miss Lonely hearts at a speakeasy...
...moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected." The bulk of these lectures consists of rapt, minute scrutiny of such trifles. Nabokov does a virtual time-and-motion study of the daylong "dance of fate" between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. He reads volumes into Flaubert's use of the word and in Madame Bovary. Under his microscope, the "flushed prism" of Proust's style reveals a particular rose-purple mauve as the precise color of time...
Charles Dickens drew Mr. Micawber straight from the outlines of his own bumbling, eternally optimistic father. When James Joyce created Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, he took a cold look at his da and virtually transcribed the old man's boozy conversation. Examples proliferate, but the point is clear: lucky the writer who is blessed with a vivid parent. The childhood may have been hellish, but the material supplied by domestic drama can be invaluable. In the endless quest for characters that is a writer's lot, there...
...attention and awe. And there is simply no way to construct a film that can contain more than a suggestion of the verbal richness of a novel. Interior monologues lose their power when they are transformed into voice-overs or dialogue scenes. Those long, obsessive scenes in which Stephen Dedalus flexes his revolutionary's muscles in aesthetic and theological debate with school friends become strangely wooden when, instead of reading them on the printed page, we are forced to watch actors trying to speak these abstractions with realistic spontaneity. As for Joyce's famous epiphanies, they seem disastrously...
Visions of spending eternity in a Steven Dedalus-like hell flashed through my brain, reinforced by Joyce's smile on the wall...