The Vermillion Blade

RAW : And so Ibsen’s Nora and Joyce’s Nora are sort of two symbols of the rise of the female energy in the modern era, and Joyce deliberately made Bloom and Ulysses the antithesis to every way of the macho values, and in Bloom’s nightmare trial he’s declared a hermaphrodite by expert medical testimony, the new model of the womanly man of the future, and so on, and the whole androgeny of the modern age is a major theme in Joyce, and the whole women’s liberation theme is very powerfully there, and that’s part of the prophetic side of Joyce, in talking about...

I: Yeah, Campbell’s last piece, his last creative work, is going to come out in a book called “Goddess”, so there it is. 

RAW: And it’s amazing how this theme - Joyce gets stronger and stronger in the exiles - and the female character having the long speech and the male character only interrupts a couple of times, and says less and less, and she - it almost turns into a monologue.  And Ulysses does angle the female monologue, and so does FW.  And, uh...

I: Getting the last word.  Well also, he definitely shows women in a respectful situation, I feel all of his interpretations.  At the same time, as he shows the flaws.

RAW: Well that’s it.  Joyce is so complicated.  There have been books written claiming that Joyce hated women, and the reason such books can be written is that Joyce’s characters are so complicated.  Every one of his female characters is marvelous and terribly flawed and full of imperfections, but that’s true of his male characters, too.  And so even though Joyce, to me, appears one of the great male feminists, his female characters are certainly not idealized any more than his male characters.  Joyce was the world’s staunchest enemy of idealism.

I: But they’re strong - the women are.

RAW: Yes, and they are tremendously flexible.  In the symbolism of FW, 

The Woman is The River 

and 

The Man is The Mountain

and 

The Mountain seems Strong, 

but it’s kind of FROZEN, 

and 

The River is Alive and DANCING

This is very much like the Yang and the Yin principles in the I Ching.  FW is isomorphic to the I Ching; I have an essay about that in the latest issue of “Semiotext(e)”.  It’s kind of hard to pursue verbally these mathematical symbols to show the full isomorphism.