Essays discussion

In another thread, Robert emphasized the structure of Aristotle's organization is "tripartite."

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

My mind immediately linked that to Joyce. (Long quote warning. I possibly only made this post to get an excuse to share this musing about Joyce.)

after the “Circe” chapter, Stephen becomes as much a Dante figure as a Telemachus surrogate, being led through a Dublin inferno of sorts by Bloom, whose guidance involves elements drawn not only from Homer’s Odysseus but also from Dante’s Virgil. But this layering of the Homeric narrative with one derived from Dante is less important than the structural debt Ulysses owes to the Commedia, mainly the Inferno. For both Dante and Joyce, narrative is not enough: the narrative needs to be held in place by a system or scheme, or rather, by multiple systems and schemes. In Dante’s poem, the structure of hell, and therefore the Inferno as well, is tripartite: the three divisions of hell proper (after limbo) house sinners guilty of incontinence, malice, and bestiality (“incontenenza, malizia, e [. . .] bestialitade” [DC, 1.11.82–83]), categories derived from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Joyce also thinks in threes and not only divides Ulysses into the Homeric Telemachia, Odyssey, and Nostos but also implies the tripartite structure of the medieval syllogism (subject, middle, and predicate) through the initial letters of each section, S, M, and P (see G, 12). Dante’s Inferno takes human anatomy as another structural principle and makes certain regions of hell correspond with particular organs or parts of the body. Joyce, likewise, assigns an organ to each chapter after the Telemachia, making the book an analogue of the body. And both Dante and Joyce make their writing so self-reflexive that both the Commedia and Ulysses have a structural integrity that is the product of their own artifice and internal correspondences. The Purgatorio, for example, repeats, in reverse, the categories of sin in the Inferno in a chiastic pattern that makes first punished last purged (the lustful are the first unrepentant sinners past the gate of hell and the last of the repentant sinners atop the Mount of Purgatory). In Ulysses, the repetitions and reversals are not always so categorical, but sometimes they are, as the schematic patterning of the first three chapters and the last three illustrates: the successive techniques of the first three being “narrative (young), catechism (impersonal), monologue (male)” and the last three “narrative (old), catechism (impersonal), monologue (female).” Joyce’s biographer says that “Dante was perhaps Joyce’s favorite author,” Oliver St. John Gogarty dubbed his friend “the Dante of Dublin” (JJII, 4, 75), and his brother Stanislaus described Dante as one of Joyce’s “gods.”2 Ulysses suggests that all three were probably right.

Source: Ulysses Explained: How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce's Modernist Vision

I don't think I would have the patience to sit still for Aristotle if it weren't for Joyce. I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time, grasping the unity of Ulysses was a major struggle that broke my brain. Somehow, reading a novel written in the 20th century prepared my mind for something that dates back to 340 BC.

IMO, this isn't just an interesting factoid, I suspect I really have to comprehend the tripartite structure of Aristotle's concept of the soul, in order to perceive the "unity" of the 10 Books of the NE.