Jonty Claypole
speaker
11,327 appearances
34 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 — 34 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Well he he's so self referential, he's sort of documenting his own genius, he's and e even as he's doing it, it's he's got the biographer the biographer's eye standing over him.
So what's he doing with this book?
What's it about?
I mean, on the simplest level and the most accessible level, he is very simply trying to recreate Dublin in its entirety on a particular day.
Before the First World War.
And he said on numerous occasions, he he talked about this.
He said at one point, I know when I was writing Ulysses, I tried to give the colour and tone of Dublin with my words, the drab yet glistening atmosphere of Dublin, its hallucinatory vapours, its tattered confusion, the atmosphere of its bars, its social immobility.
They could only be conveyed by the texture of my words.
Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be.
Well, that's your view, Mr.
Joyce.
The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion.
Talent is the gift of conveying that emotion.
So he's trying to capture the spirit of an entire city on a particular day.
But it raises the question: why does he go to the Odyssey to?
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.
Showing 3021–3040 of 11,327 · page 152 of 567
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