Jonty Claypole
speaker
9,840 appearances
30 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Jonty Claypole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.
Appearances
as a book to read now, it's just this kind of horrible, self-important male ego that's really off-putting.
Yeah, that's right, Sophie.
It's running concurrently.
And the seeds of the book happen in the same year, 1904, which is when he starts writing the first story of Dubliners.
And early in 1904, he writes an essay called Portrait of the Artist, which you can read, which is almost like a blueprint for the book that eventually emerges.
But it's incredibly dreary and it hasn't got any of the innovations and style that he's going to hit upon.
And I think to realize the power of what he's doing,
We need to go back to what he says in this 1904 proto-essay, Portrait of the Artist.
He begins this by talking about the emerging consciousness of a child.
But in 1904, Joyce and no writer has the kind of means to get into the consciousness of a child.
So the best Joyce can do at this point in 1904 is describe it.
This is how this essay starts.
The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for so capricious are we that we cannot and will not conceive the past in any other than in its iron memorial aspect.
Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presence, the development of an entity of which our actual presence is a phase only.
Our world again recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of Beard and Inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art by some process of the mind as yet untabulated to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts.
But for such as these, a portrait is not an identificative paper, but rather the curve of an emotion."
Now, that is gobbledygook.
And it's Joyce saying that if he was to kind of write a story about the development of a consciousness from childhood onwards, he would need to find some language to do it.
But he's not able to do that yet.
writer really could have done at that point but four years later he sort of cracked it Sophie hasn't he and you're now going to read us where he gets to because it's in this moment I think we see what is best about Joyce and what is so exciting about Joyce.
Showing 2261–2280 of 9,840 · page 114 of 492
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