Breaking Up with James Joyce
sydneyreviewofbooks.com
sydneyreviewofbooks.com
That would seem to me to be the inevitable result of such an endeavor given the relative scales of Ulysses and a typical human life span. Even just trying to read Ulysses carries a certain non-negligible risk in this regard. I myself narrowly escaped a brush with catastrophe when assigned to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was myself a young man (in high school). I thank God daily that I lived to warn others.
;-)
He was halfway through “Wandering Rocks” a “mere” 6.75 years in, and I had been estimating he’d be at my favorite “Cyclops” by around now. :(
That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.
Sounds good to me.
Art sometimes is best absorbed rather than understood. Great art can reveal when pressed, but I usually only do that randomly to ensure that there is substance there, and there usually is.
Having said that, I am still reading the book only a few pages at a time every other week or so. I’m 25 years in and not even close to being done. I’m ok with that.
I've never read it end to end, and I probably never will, but there are passages I have memorized just from rereading them so many times.
Edit / To clarify: I know about art and people's preferences. I am not English/Irish, am no expert in Shakespeares' works or "speak" fluent Latin, so there will be things I won't understand without some (sometimes substantial) effort on my part (reading Ulysses) - I know that. I am also capable to enjoy unconventional styles and writing (like Naked Lunch, for example - no comparison, just an example).
With Joyce, however, I just can't shake the feeling the guy was just showing-off and making fun of the people who later try to convince others and/or themselves that they "got it".
But to each their own.
I've enjoyed Ulysses though. Even on the most simple level, you can, for example, read the book with a clock and a map of Dublin and follow what's happening in real time (the reading time seems to match the time described in the book).
Anyway, my point was that art is, essentially, to be enjoyed. I've enjoyed it. Great. You didn't. Good as well. What's weird though is the academics analyzing books nine-to-five, to put food on the table.
It's a meme/drug. It evokes a mental buzz - in some people. Some people are drawn in by the gigantic accomplishment, the magnitude of the writing, some by the strangeness of the content itself, some by other means. (Maybe trying to understand what others see in it.) Some then get sober soon, some take decades.
Aka the "everybody else is an idiot for not getting it except me" theory...
How about it's just that literature or specifically 20th century literature isn't your thing?
There is tons of great Joyce scholarship without those lightweight complaints.
And yet, there doesn't need to be, to be frank. Books are to be read and perhaps re-read by readers, not to be over-analysed for decades by obsessives.
For literary works, as a reader you either get it or you don't, and if do it's primarily on a visceral level that beyond the plot and the craft includes the emotions, the flow of words, the mental imagery etc. It's not meant to be some great riddle to be solved, as if it's the Voynich manuscript.
I submit that Finnegans Wake is the exception proving that some books are specifically written "to be over-analysed for decades by obsessives."
Ulysses definitely requires a good grounding in artes liberales at the university level (or simply being a very bookish person regardless of formal education or not), but if you have that, then you can certainly read right through the book. Some allusions or references might escape you, but you can always refer to a commentary, because it is pretty well agreed what everything in that book means.
The Wake is a whole other story. Joyce’s oneiric storytelling and sheer amount of puns makes it difficult to pin down even some of the basic plot. But don’t let that book or scholars’ fatigue and ultimately dismissive view of it turn you off from everything else that Joyce wrote.
I’m no Joyce scholar by any means so I don’t know if that’s true, but that was my reading of the article anyhow.
If it made people feel clever to continue to "get" something that is in fact fundamentally not gettable, you could certainly see a century-long ruse with wide support and nuanced debates on gettedness.
Again, nothing to do with Joyce, just people.
Or why slang evolves in some contexts even when not need (though not the only reason).
So it's linguistic jazz playing an underlying story and decorating it on top. But it's definitely not for everybody.
If you are referring to Molly Bloom’s monologue (the only part of Ulysses with no punctuation), there is plenty of coherence. Most of what she muses over are things that the reader knows well about, because it was already introduced earlier in the book. That whole chapter is a capstone to the plot that surveys one of the main conflicts of the book (the Blooms’ shaky marriage, Boylan’s adultery) and then neatly leads it to a conclusion.
And I find it strange that someone points to this chapter of Ulysses as an example of impenetrability, since it is much clearer and requires much less erudition than, say, the Oxen of the Sun chapter that requires a firm grounding in the entire English literary tradition. Molly Bloom’s monologue has in fact often been staged as a standalone thing precisely because it is so straightforward a text.
You're not pseud enough to know, my mate.
I don't think it takes a special person to enjoy, but it does require a particular mindset that any given person may or may not have at the time. It's sort of how "Catcher in the Rye" is brilliant when you're a teenager, and how very, very different it is when you're an adult.
On the Road is not the sort of book that I'd spend much time with now, but I've grown towards, and to appreciate the brevity of Hemingway or Elmore Leonard more now, but if you're not inclined towards Joyce, wait a while. If it never happens, so be it.
> his life was driven by his one-eyed obsession to fulfil his destiny > The method did not please Joyce very much because he considered it not imaginative enough, but it was the only way he could work.
What if Joyce wrote not to be enjoyed but to gain a literary reputation? (You could claim that the literary establishment favours books its members enjoy, but I think that's only true if you define "enjoy" in a way that removes all meaning)
I have never been able to get through even a few paragraphs of Joyce without feeling the need to throw the book down and scream WTBF? I guess I'm not a special kind of person.