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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.
Appearances
It's a brilliant opening.
And the question is how he gets there in four years, you know, how he gets from that incomprehensible essay beginning that he wrote in 1904, where he is in that adult mode trying to describe the features of infancy to actually inhabiting the point of view of infancy.
1904 is the moment where Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends.
The book ends with the young Stephen Dedalus about to embark to Europe, just as Joyce did at the end of 1904 when he moves to Pula and then Trieste.
What happens in those following three to four years is Joyce absolutely immerses himself in the new innovative literature and art coming out of Europe that he's exposed to.
He's delivering on the promise that Stephen Dedalus is proposing at the end of Portrait of the Artist.
You know, Stephen Dedalus says, in order to escape from the claustrophobia of Dublin, from the oppression of English intellectual culture,
colonization from the Catholic Church.
I've got to get to Europe.
I've got to leap over Britain and get to Europe and immerse myself in the culture there.
And that's what he does.
And the things that he's exposing himself to, Joyce, over those coming three years completely change his understanding of what literature can be.
So in 1984, he immediately, after writing that blueprint essay, Portrait of the Artist, starts to write the first version of Portrait of the Artist.
It's called Stephen Hero at this time.
And I remember at university, it wasn't bad enough or punishing enough that you had to read Portrait of the Artist.
You also had to read it in comparison with Stephen Hero, the book.
I think that's what we're reacting to here, Sophie, isn't it?
The reverence for Joyce that we were encouraged to have and feel slightly resentful about now.
So by 1907, he decides he's completely unhappy with it.
with Stephen Hero.
Showing 2281–2300 of 9,840 · page 115 of 492
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