German Writing System and James Joyce
This post is about two completely separate topics, but I was thinking about both.
The first thing deals with what Dr. Brooks was saying the other day about the new writing system the Germans introduced prior to the Holocaust. Erin and I both studied abroad in Poland this past summer with Dr. Krammer, a professor in the history department. Last Thursday, I went to his class to hear a Holocaust survivor I know speak. After the lecture, I went to Dr. Krammer’s office and thought to ask him about this writing system. I can’t remember the name of it, but he did take a book out to show me what it looked like, and it was wild. They pretty much took every letter of the usual alphabet and came up with a different symbol that barely resembled it. The sentences at the bottom of the page were impossible to read. I can definitely see how this new system of keeping records could cause a massive amount of confusion.
The other quick thought deals with the James Joyce class I’m taking right now. This stuff is all over his writing! It’s especially prevalent in Ulysses. I always have to read outside notes along with the text itself so that I can make sure I know what’s going on and this was a paragraph explaining part of the chapter Scylla and Charybdis-
Stephen’s meditations on paternity take on a particular urgency in Episode Nine. Stephen envisions ideal paternity as literary creation—he argues that Shakespeare is not merely father to his son Hamnet but to all humanity. Stephen’s further arguments about the tenuosity of the father-son relationship and the insignificance of fathers relates to his own experience of alienation from his father. Much of Stephen’s Hamlet theory seems to develop out of his own life, and we see Stephen thinking about parallel personal matters—his mother, his sexuality, and so on—while he argues about Shakespeare’s life and work.
Insignificant fathers, literary creation, and Hamlet all in one! My professor actually mentioned not too long ago that in literature, men focus exclusively all the time on the idea of “is this really my son?” In my reading tonight, Leopold Bloom was worried about writing a letter to his semi-mistress when he began to fret over being the “last of my race” because his only son Rudy had died, and he was now too old to do anything about it. I’m sure this will all just intensify as we get further into it.
-Alex