Do you think this is difficult to understand or boring?
—
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of the jarvies with the request:
—You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?
The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.
—Thank you, the sailor said. He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow stammers, proceeded:
—We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.
In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.
—You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked, leaning on the counter.
—Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I’ve circumnavigated a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage. I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilyou. That’s how the Russians prays.
—You seen queer sights, don’t be talking, put in a jarvey.
—Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his teeth, bit ferociously:
—Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.
All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
—Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can’t bear no more children. See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse’s liver raw.
His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for several minutes if not more.
—Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.
Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:
—Glass. That boggles ’em. Glass.
Look at it like this: pretty much everything put out by Pink Floyd was nonsense, drug-induced stupid childish nonsense aimed at alienated teenagers. But musically excellent, produced to a very high technical standard. The individuals who made the music were excellent musicians.
But the words and what they expressed went nowhere, contained nothing of value, are almost completely forgettable. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I'll grant that the Joyce passage you quoted is musically interesting, in a way, if you enjoy the sound of words without thinking of what they mean, in the same way that one listens to Pink Floyd as music without thinking about what the words mean.
Perhaps there are people for whom the sound of words is enjoyable as music, without regard to meaning. I like music a lot, and have made money playing music when I was younger, but I know there are people who experience music on a much different level than I do. I'll concede that people of this sort may find Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake enjoyable, and are sincere in doing so.
But to me it seems like drivel, and having read several things about Joyce's life, I don't think he meant them as serious. I think he was laughing at his readers, and saw their pretentious efforts to read meaning into his output as part of his own accomplishment, a demonstration of his view that life and society and reality is a sick joke.
That’s a good excerpt but so much of it is hard to understand and boring.
I agree, it is a good quote and gives me pause.
I also agree that one has to plow through a lot of dreck to get to it, which I didn’t have the patience to do.
I thank ifinnegan for providing it.