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 ...
Finnegan’s Wake is unreadable.
Ulysses is BARELY readable.
Haveth Childers Everywhere
Anyone who assigned Ulysses in a Literature 101 class should have been shot at dawn
‘How many other classics are also that way?’
I nominate Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom’...
I found “Moby Dick” to be an easy read, just L-O-N-G! Melville must have gotten paid by the word. Same for “Don Quixote”.
The only Ulysses I have read was by Homer(The Odyssey) and it was great! Same for War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago.
But then I was not under stress to finish them fast.
The Citizen Kane of books.
Still do not get the attraction for this film, doesn’t suck.
Now, The Third Man....
I never saw “Shakespearew in Love”.
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” was more than enough.
‘I nominate Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom’...’
I also recommend Ken Kesey’s ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’...
See I regard AA as the great American prose tragedy.
I read “Moby Dick” when I was 16 as part of my English curriculum in my junior year in high school. It was dense and slow-moving, but I found it to be a fascinating look into the world of antebellum America.
Even Conrad?
Three sentence summary of the plot.
Run on sentences not allowed.
Go.
‘The attraction is how teeming with life it is.’
you have a point there; I had always thought it dense, with endless literary roots intertwining into a formless ball; but I thought that after wading through a semester of Faulkner, having heard of Joyce’s influence on him...
dense...? formless...? Faulkner (though I loved his work) was the Gordian Knot of the novel canon...
Movie makers admire Citizen Kane for its cinematographic aspects—camera angles, editing, etc. It is said that Citizen Kane is the greatest film while Gone with the Wind is the greatest movie.
‘Three sentence summary of the plot.’
there is no plot. There never was a plot intended. I hope that answered the question.
It’s not plot driven but experience driven. It’s an Epic written on the head of a pin. The normal subject of the Epic was a years long struggle by nearly super-human heroes with a nation at stake (Homer, Virgil etc), it’s set on one day and involves completely ordinary, everyday people doing ordinary everyday things and finds the heroism in that. Just persisting. And within that moment to moment struggle, Joyce incorporates the vast accumulated cultural legacy of the West which is expressed in both high and low language.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.