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 ...
My favorite passage.
CK is funny! It’s a newspaper comedy co-written by a guy who worked on Marx Brothers films.
Eliot was a Unitarian until 1927, after reading Ulysses and writing The Waste Land.
What bearing would that have?
Since the two main protagonists in the novel are atheists, one esthete and the other science-driven, a Unitarian would not be bothered by the essence of their lives, but a Christian, particularly an "anglo-Catholic" as Eliot described himself, might be bothered. cf. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/ulysses/themes/religion-atheism-and-philosophy
Ayn Rands “Atlas Shrugged” was bad. I wanted to know how it ended so I hung in there, but it was nearly as bad as the movie made with Gary Cooper of one of her books.
I don’t like to immerse myself in a book that sounds boring like Ulysses, there are too many books to read that aren’t and my life is finite.
Ulysses is massively influential. Indirectly, through other writers. It’s one of those challenges that are always out there...like climbing a famous mountain.
Fully admit that this is a personal opinion, but Doctor Zhivago to me is one of those rare instances where the 1966 movie is actually better than the original novel. In the movie, the characters portray the differing philosophies, while in the novel, the philosophical discussions are supposed to portray the characters. A particular example of this is the long dialogue in the novel with the drunken Komarovsky, the night before K. takes Lara and her daughter to safety; in the movie this is transformed into a one-minute time-pressured encounter that accomplishes the same effect (showing that Zhivago is principled and K. will do what it takes to avoid Bolshevik punishment).
I thought that film was a complete gloss. Omar Shariff didn’t have the charisma for that sort of thing. You never got the sense this person was a great intellect or poet etc.
Nice!
I think people approach the book as something difficult, which it can be at first. The better way is simply enjoy Joyce’s quick humor and cleverness. I’ll give one example: Bloom is in a pub and gets into an argument about being a Jew. “Jesus was a Jew! His mother was a Jew and his father was a Jew too!” he shouts. One of his friends then hustles him out before things gets out of hand by saying “That’s enough with you now! And Jesus had no father!”.
This reminds me of the many times I have tried to read an entire novel by Proust. I tried. I really tried, but the subject seems to react to everything under and over the sun, and he does this with dark, dense clouds full of run on sentences. Maybe I’ll try it again, someday when I’m older.
It was the textbook for a senior-level class I took in aesthetics. The professor charged us to read it again in another few decades, when (I paraphrase!) our dogma got run over by our karma. Then, we will see how incredibly funny Ulysses is!
(The original, and a Turkish translation, wail to me from a storage locker ... )
I pride myself on reading every book I start but I couldn’t finish Ulysses and felt it was just an homage to what was already written.
Proust only wrote one novel :)
Yeah, but...
It is a wonderful book.I majored in English as an undergraduate and concentrated on Irish literature. One way to look at Ulysses is that most writers craft wonderful clothes while Joyce has woven a wonderful fabric. It might seem formless but it’s beautiful and can become many things for the reader.
Ok.
I think we have a failure of language here.
It is.
Whiny, uninteresting people mope about drinking and screwing all day.
I liked this one from the BOOK. Shows why WE are having so many anarchists in the US today trying to tear down the US.
“That’s naive,” said Pogorevshikh. “What you call disorder is
just as normal a state of things as the order you’re so keen
about. All this destruction — it’s a natural and preliminary stage
of a broad creative plan. Society has not yet disintegrated
sufficiently. It must fall to pieces completely then a genuinely
revolutionary government will put the pieces together and build
on completely new foundations.”
It’s over a thousand pages. Lots of things happen.
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