Posted on 12/09/2022 2:12:50 PM PST by Borges
In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.
(Excerpt) Read more at theparisreview.org ...
‘...even tried some Wilkie Collins.’
‘The Moonstone...’
‘nuff said...
June 16th is now a semi major holiday called Bloomsday, mostly in Ireland but also in other places around the world including New York City. The celebration includes pub crawls, readings of "Ulysses" out in public, and people dressed in Edwardian costume. Heavy drinking is the norm.
‘No plot, not a novel.’
no offense, but that is not true...
Wow. IF only I had been able to write like that, long ago.
HOD takes place mostly on a ship.
I never tried that one, but The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying were certainly hard enough to figure out.
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow also didn't seem to have much of a point.
Mostly yeah! At the end they arrive to where they are going of course.
THere are plenty of books with little in the way of plot that qualify as novels. Walker Percy’s uninteresting book “The Moviegoer” comes to mind. That is more along the lines of a character study, but a novel nonetheless.
Here Comes Everybody
Well the “Not likely to be popular with Freepers” was just my guess. But looking at the thread it looks like I guessed right.
But different strokes certainly applies here. I’m certainly not going to criticize anyone for liking Ulysses. BTW, I did read “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and it was at least readable.
Movie makers admire Citizen Kane for its cinematographic aspects—camera angles, editing, etc.
I see that. Again, Third Man?
Better story. With all the other stuff.
Greatest movie? GWTW?
FWIW, my dad and my kid sister agree.
Me, The Searchers.
All the best! :)
“Three sentence summary of the plot.”
This eassayist described it well. It’s more than three sentences, though.
“The action begins in Dublin on the morning of June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus—the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, now a twenty-two-year-old university graduate living in Sandycove—has breakfast with his housemates and then goes to teach a class at the private boys’ school where he works. It’s payday, so he picks up his wages and then walks along Sandymount Strand, still wearing black to mark the death of his mother nearly a year before.
Next, we meet Leopold and Molly Bloom, a married couple in their thirties living on the north side of the city. Molly earns money as a concert soprano; Leopold is an advertising agent, the son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. When we first encounter them, Molly is planning to begin an affair with her tour manager Blazes Boylan when he visits her at her home that afternoon. Leopold is tacitly aware of her plans and, for whatever reason, makes sure to be out of the house in order to facilitate them. He goes out in the morning, buys a cake of soap, attends a funeral, eats lunch, does incredibly little work considering that it’s a weekday, and has dinner. All the while, he’s thinking of his wife, as well as their teenage daughter Milly and their late son Rudy, who died in infancy.
Meanwhile, Stephen Dedalus is also rambling around the city, adrift and increasingly drunk. He visits the offices of a newspaper and later stops in at the National Library to give a confusing and inebriated lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Even after Molly and her new lover Boylan have presumably parted, Leopold Bloom continues to wander. He’s insulted and attacked by an anti-Semite in Barney Kiernan’s pub, and he later masturbates on a beach while looking up a young woman’s skirt. At around 10 P.M., at a drinking session in—of all places—the National Maternity Hospital, Bloom and Stephen finally run into each other, and continue their wanderings together.
After a visit to a brothel, Stephen is assaulted in the street by a British soldier, and Bloom gets him back on his feet and takes him to a cabman’s shelter. The men then walk back to Bloom’s house, where they drink cocoa and talk. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, but Stephen declines. After he leaves, Bloom goes upstairs and gets into bed with Molly. They exchange some conversation, during which he tells her that Stephen is going to give her Italian lessons, and then Bloom falls asleep.
In bed beside him, Molly thinks back over her day and her life, reflecting on her new love affair with Boylan, anticipating a possible future love affair with Stephen, and remembering the days of her early youth and the beginning of her relationship with her husband. Countless other characters appear, and countless other occurrences are described, but this seems (at least to me) like a fair summary of the book’s main events”
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Why am I not sirprised that the author of this piece turns Joyce into a feminist in the tradition of Jane Austin. Boring on all levels!
I love his little trick at the very end of the book where he purposely confuses the reader as to who is speaking. His point being, I thought, that by that time the division between them no longer mattered.
When they meet up with the Indians, hilarious.
Ending of The Dead in Dubliners.
Welles didn’t make Third Man. He only starred in it.
Carol Reed made it.
There’s a scene where Joseph Cotton as asked about James Joyce.
And you’re right, it’s a great movie.
That is probably one of the worst movies ever made. I finally saw it and realized I had been conned. The reason it was rated so highly is that is basically Hollywood navel gazing at itself. It might have been a hoot if you lived in Hollywood.
God what a film devoid of anything interesting.
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