Jonty Claypole
speaker
10,992 appearances
33 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard yesterday
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 — 33 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.
Appearances
To do this.
And we talked in our last episode on Portrait at the end of that, we talked about how he sees these ancient epics as providing a structure or foundation point from which you can essentially digress.
If you're tracking a story or a piece of writing close to the Odyssey,
You can actually indulge a huge amount of digression and obscurity because the reader has the structure of that ancient myth to give it direction and help it pass through.
So so that's one reason.
He's also was very drawn to the idea of and he talked about this again to one of his students, of Odysseus as a wanderer.
And he said to a student, the motif of wandering, the motive.
Of the artist who will now lay down his life rather than renounce his interest is what he's drawn to in the Odyssey.
So the idea of Stephen and Leopold as these wandering characters wandering through the city, but they're aesthetic wanderers rather than physical wanderers in the way that Odysseus is.
So that's all going on too.
And the last thing we said in our portrait episode as well is that he hits on the Odyssey.
We felt partly because it gives them a way of getting beyond Stephen Daedalus.
And The Portrait of the Artist is a strikingly humorless book in comparison to Ulysses, which one of the most surprising things about it is it is a funny book.
It is witty.
You can have many strong feelings about Ulysses as a work of art, but it but it has a playfulness and a wit which is very beguiling.
helps draw you in at times when you're being infuriated by it.
But what he gets from the Odyssey is that the Odyssey of course begins with the story of Telemachus, who is the kind of Stephen Deedalus character, but Telemachus's journey in the Odyssey, in Homer's Odyssey, quickly sort of expands out, uh, and Odysseus's narrative takes over, and all the characters who Odysseus encounters.
And
I feel that Joyce uses Deodysse as a way of getting beyond Stephen Dedalus, who he's a little bit fed up with.
He uses it to start with Stephen, and then suddenly the story smash cuts to Leopold Bloom and all of the wider cast of of Dublin.
Showing 2701–2720 of 10,992 · page 136 of 550
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