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 ...
You didn’t read the book.
Dedalus, a young teacher, doesn’t mope about drinking - he does drink, all day, til he is so wasted he has a hallucination about his recently dead mother whom he feels guilt over for his treatment of her as she was dying, and he smashes a chandelier then gets punched out by an English soldier.
You say he does not mope about drinking and then say he drinks and mopes.
I admit I left out the part about his destroying other people's property (because of the moping and drinking) but I still covered the book in one sentence.
I left out the fact that they are all going to die with various STDs as well. It did not seem extremely relevant.
None of them interesting.
Drinking, moping, screwing and whacking off by uninteresting whiny people.
Written by a Russian-Polish-American Jew from Baltimore who never lived in Ireland. Sure.
Leopold Bloom has a tremendous imagination and inner life. And the immense cast of characters that make their way through the novel are dynamic. Also the sheer pleasure of reading the prose.
The OP's lecture was interesting on the turning point represented by the novels of Jane Austen, and how her work was an unacknowledged but essential forerunner of Ulysses. In some sense, Ulysses and the confessional poetry kicked off by D.H. Lawrence at the dawn of the 20th century were part of the percolating marxist revolution that Joyce touched on in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where he describes university students fascinated by the Red Soviet overthrow trying to induct other Irish Catholic students into their atheist communist cult, which in this century has become a dominant cultural reality throughout the former Christendom.
In an ironic sense, as the "relational" novels of Austen led to the "experiential" novel about quotidian minutiae Ulysses (carrying within it a marxist undertow of post-Truth), Ulysses led not only to dystopian fiction, but also to Seinfeld, "a show about nothing."
Dystopian fiction had been around well before Ulysses. Zamyatin’s “We” was published the year before. The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, hell even “The Time Machine”. Many others.
“ You say he does not mope about drinking and then say he drinks and mopes.”
I didn’t say he mopes. He does pretty much the opposite of moping.
That is moping.
He is a drunken sad sack. "Oh woe is me, I behaved like a jerk to my mother! Oh gloom, despair and misery on me!"
He could have at least done it in haiku. That would have been moderately interesting from a linguistic point of view.
No.
In fact I would argue just the opposite.
He has no imagination or creativity.
He epitomizes the drunken bore that corners you at the office Christmas party and will not shut up.
The kind of man whom duct tape improves enormously.
But as I have noted before, the surprise would be if our tastes ever agreed.
A drunken bore? He hardly talks! He’s ultimately passive and observes the people around him. He’s constantly acted upon by others.
One could say this sort of experiential lit started with Wordsworth. The Prelude is about the awakening of his consciousness.
Unless you’re talking about Dedalus. He gives that long drunken lecture about Hamlet.
Back in the 60’s the group of college guys I hung out with knew we were headed in one direction or other; either to one of the fighting services and Nam, or maybe Korea, the way it seemed to be heading towards Korean War 2 or to subversive political activity disguised as graduate school. Most of us, the most Nam bound types especially, had been to several big and rowdy/violent anti-Viet Nam demonstrations and loved the adrenalin ruah and the host of available girls also hooked on adrenalin and grass. We all loved reading about and discussing the ‘20th century culture of political revolution’ Russia, Nazi Germany, Spain, China, Cuba , Viet nam. Russia was the most fascinating, revolution,seizing power, big civil war, wars with border states and against foreign interventionists, ‘building socialism out of the barrel of a gun’, Attempts to spread revolution around the world, crushing the kulaks, building a huge army and a massive heavy industrial base, hug/huge war to the death with Hitler Germany. It just seemed intoxicating. Live or die you would feel alive every minute. The most left guy, who did indeed have to flee the country and surfaced in East Germany, loved his version of the Nietzsche quote about a really good fight enobling any cause. I remember right after graduation the last time I ever saw the guy; we shook hands and he said ‘I hope you survive Nam’, I replied ‘I hope you just survive’. we laughed and went our opposite ways. Ah, great memories.
It has been thirty years since I read it.
I thought it was both turgid and too short. Orwell does a good job describing how the ‘new state’ operates.
No, the Congo River and then Belgium. The protagonist, Marlowe, is a blue water sailor and hates the ‘big river’ country and everything else about King Leopold’s private country.
New Orleans has the ‘Stella Scream’ and drinking interspersed with gun fire.
I recall one description of Ulysses as the most precisely structured literary work since The Divine Comedy.
You didn’t even think it was funny? Or enjoy the beauty of the prose?
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.