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 ...
I did not buy that either.
If whiny drunks moping and no plot are your thing then Useless... I mean Ulysses, is the book for you but to try put it up there with Dante? The guy who literally reshaped the entire world's view of what is the afterlife?
Who ever wrote that was smoking something stronger then mary-ja-wana.
Ulysses reshaped what the novel could do or what prose could do. And how experience both physical and the inner life could be captured with language. It’s also a summation of Western Culture from Homer till World War 1.
All the writers it included must be wrong then.
“Influenced”
Drunk people moping and screwing is not the "a summation of Western Culture" and people knew long before Useless was written that prose could be used to bore you to death.
The book had no impact on the world and if it had never been written, nothing would have changed.
Virtually the entire Modernist/PostModernist school came out it: Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Jean Toomer, Nabokov, Faulkner, Delillo, Rushdie, Roberto Bolaño, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison...many others.
Explains so much.
You just don’t like Modernism. Let me guess, Atonal music isn’t real music?
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