Ulysses at 100: the birth of the modern

The Financial Times ^ | 1/21/22 | Colm Tóibín

[Borges]

James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in 1922, just over two weeks after the British handed over the keys of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins and his new Irish government. The other great literary event of that year was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Joyce’s novel had much in common with Eliot’s long poem — it dealt with the rawness of urban life using competing narrative forms, including pastiche and myth and different kinds of voices. The Waste Land sounded a sort of death knell for the narrative poem, just as Ulysses set about killing off the single-perspective, the all-knowing authorial voice — firing the starting gun for a wave of “modernist” writing, from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett, that comprehensively rewrote the rules as to how literature was approached and presented.

Ulysses, now celebrating its centenary, has grown in importance over the past 100 years, during which it has repeatedly been declared one of — if not the — greatest novels of the 20th century.

[Borges]

Even the Dubliners stories? “The Dead” might be the best short story ever written in English.

[Don W]

I cannot stand his style. Period.

Those that like it, enjoy, but please don’t belabour me with tales of how impressed and admiring you are of his work, because I am not the least impressed. And I managed to slog my way through War and Peace.

Oh, and 16000 words is NOT a short story, it’s a small novella that is droning on and on and on and on and on about NOTHING of any import. It’s sort of like the TV show “Seinfeld”, but less entertaining. Oh, I learned that show was meant to be a comedy. Who knew?

[ifinnegan]

You seem angry, bro.

[Borges]

“The Dead” is about quite a few things, including how people deal with memory and compartmentalize.

You didn’t like “War and Peace”? I read it again last year - it’s like being in the company of people you like and know well.