The game with Joyce, from my experience, is to know those nuggets are in the mine, and to persevere to find them.-Submitted by Anonymous It might come in the form of a description, an impression, a story, or a plain old outburst. Third, and this must be the most important thing that kept me going, is that virtually on every page there is a total mind blower. His knowledge of antiquity is astonishing. Second, Joyce's command of the knowledge base of the time. The British Empire was high, and many Irish were profiting. The young man's banter was more British than Irish. This is a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in about 1904. Actually, I went along for some time thinking the city we were in was London, instead of Dublin, which it is.
First, Joyce's command of the English language. Three things kept me interested enough to stay with it. It took me until about page ninety to get into Joyce's writing. Needless to say, the pace has since picked up.
Twenty-four days after purchasing a New Library hardback edition, twenty-four days of struggling, I paused to glance at the page number. Having aborted six prior reads, I approached my current reading of James Joyce's "Ulysses" with determination and resolve. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Dedalus's accent-that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite-will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.īoth characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. And thanks to the books stream-of-consciousness technique-which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river-we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.Īmong other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens? In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. Wells was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. Woolsey declared it an emetic book-although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States-and H. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable.
0 kommentar(er)
