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
Now, for everything I think about this book, which is mostly not positive, I think that is an extraordinary passage.
It's totally extraordinary.
Full of ideas that are going to be completely revelatory to not only T.S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound, but actually a great many writers at the time and Virginia Woolf herself.
who, as we've said, has this very complicated relationship with Joyce.
She sees his brilliance, she sees his importance, and she doesn't like the outcome, like we do as well.
He hits upon this completely fascinating and original idea about what it is to write an epic, about what it is to write in the modern world, and that the job of the artist, of the writer, is by bringing their personality to the
is paradoxically to impersonalise, to remove themselves away from it.
It's incredibly complicated.
I think what you were saying earlier, Sophie, when you were talking about Virginia Woolf and the waves...
And actually implicit, you were implicitly saying it's superior because it's the logical place where Joyce is trying to get.
I completely agree with.
I think The Waves is the sort of book that Joyce was actually trying to write.
One where the eye has dissolved and what we have is this kind of roaming consciousness between the characters.
And he never quite manages to do it.
He doesn't manage to do it in Portrait of the Artist, which for all of the brilliance of that statement is simultaneously so weighed down by the ego and the personality of the artist.
Like it's a failure in that regard.
Yeah, and to end this on a cliffhanger, I think the reason why he settles on the Odyssey as the epic that he's going to use to achieve his aesthetic aim that we've just been describing is that I think he knows he hasn't managed to depersonalise in Portrait of the Artist.
I think he knows that he's weighed down by himself and the character of Stephen.
And if you think what is a great mythical epic book is...
Showing 2461–2480 of 9,840 · page 124 of 492
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