James Joyce was a complicated man
thefitzwilliam.com
thefitzwilliam.com
Not only do they have a fantastic full cast reading of the book, but for each chapter they have a companion episode where they talk to a Joyce scholar about the chapter. I went through it by alternating listening to a chapter then listing to the episode about the chapter, and I finally really got Joyce and understood why he is considered great.
It's way more approachable than Ulysses, the hard parts of it are more self-contained, and if the reader decides to go on to Ulysses they'll have a good understanding of Stephen as a character
Really in hindsight I think I liked Portrait more just because you don't have to do as much homework to understand it. It's somewhere in between the general appeal of Dubliners and the masturbatory, literary stuff in Ulysses
For Finnegan's Wake - I find it's best to open it up at random and shout it out as you pace around. Maybe peer at yourself now and again in a mirror. If you can work it up to a roar, then you'll really be flying, but it'd depend on what you had for breakfast.
For me it will be back to Dubliners—should not have skipped it.
I wish we had a recording of him reading it cover to cover.
I learned this in college taking a middle English literature course. The Canterbury tales really need to be read out loud. They have a cadence that needs to be spoken.
I would actually argue that Joyce is in the same category. His work isn't meant to be internal. It's storytelling in a group and meant to be spoken. It helps understand the DENSE writing.
I don't even think audiobooks are necessarily bad, it's people consuming them like a hamburger while they multitask so they aren't even really engaging with the text. Let alone not really having the ability to stop, think and relisten very easily. With a text you do it basically automatically if necessary, with an audiobook you've got to fumble around for your device and hope you get back to the right spot and not break your train of thought in the process.
Oral storytelling used to happen in small intimate groups around fires with a couple of lamps lit, total silence, wind howling, drinks and sometimes other delights, with no conceivable distractions. Even saying "no distractions" isn't accurate, as it was moreso the case that they'd a completely different conception of time. The stories would be told live by another human, with their voice and body and eyes looking at you.
Reading is different than oral storytelling - it doesn't pretend to be the same thing, at least not anymore. Creating a hierarchy between the three is, I find, a bit odd, in general.
A much later and much more obscure American writer, R. A. Lafferty, was deeply influenced by ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, and his prose is better understood if you think of it as being read loud to a large crowd.
And it sucks because sometimes I really just want to write it up as nonsense and put it down, but is seems like there is some kind of system there
https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...
“ I feel I need not worry so much about “misreading” Joyce. Every reading of Ulysses is a misreading, a faulty but revealing translation, a way of drawing the novel into new and perhaps unintended relationships. All that matters to me is finding a way to read the book that is interesting: that opens out instead of closing down.” [1]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/12/07/misreading-ul...
I actually have to credit Joseph Heller for the nudge to start, I had recently remembered a quote in Catch-22 that stuck with me:
"He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it."
Circe definitely makes it worth it. Even though that chapter is huge, it feels very short
Is this a misspelling? I can not find a definition of "arsthitic".
the 'arsthitic' tendency of Ulysses, as Pound called it, suggesting in his pun that Joyce's artistic integrity was being compromised by his attention to lower matters.I don't remember most of these themes being raised. I remember the teacher saying with awe, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" and me thinking, "Who cares?"
He also went on and on about Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing, and how that was a real reflection of how we think. Again, I thought, "So what? It's old hat now."
As for the fragmentary style: sorry, this didn't impress me either, at the time.
Good article.
I would normally think that saying someone can do anything they want with (X) would be an assertion of absolute mastery, and one should care if someone is an absolute master in something.
This candidate can do whatever he wants with our main programming language, yeah but I'm still going to hire this one guy who said graduating code camp last week was super cool!
The chef at this restaurant can achieve whatever effect they want with food, sure, but me and the band are going to eat these delicious street dogs!
it would be easy to make more absurd examples..
Like, for example, "this man can do whatever he wants with flipping a coffee cup!" (that's a real example, btw)
"this woman is an absolute master of beer pong."
The skill has to be valuable.
Like if you're going to read Ulysses, there are a bunch of companion books that are entirely footnotes for the thousands of unexplained references. Ofc you don't have to read every footnote, but there's considerable overhead involved in reading him
Ditto for the Wake, most people just give up and assume it's nonsense. But there is some general story behind it and it too has a bunch of homework
Portrait is more approachable and I got more out of it per ounce of labor involved
It's nice to be able to just pick up a book and read it, no? Like if you know basic Russian history you can pick up a Dostoevsky and read through it without too much hassle
I'm not sure what changed in the literary world that made authors prioritize showing off over being understood by anyone
B) "From then on, Joyce lived in Europe." Isn't Ireland in Europe...?
C)
“Just as ancient Egypt is dead,” he wrote, “so is ancient Ireland.” His aim was not to become bound to a romanticised notion of the Irish past, but to show modern Ireland to itself and to make an Irish literature that was truly European."
D) If this essay interested you and you haven't read The Hyperion Cantos, I highly highly recommend it! Simmons employs Joyce as a central motif throughout the series, which I recall being somewhat confounding at the time, but likely eye-opening if you're familiar with the man's work!
-- technically yes, of course. In reality? Eh, it's complicated. There's probably a few reasons, but if you told an Irish person they were European, people would be bemused, at least.
They said "bemused", not that it was touchy. The comment seems to imply that Ireland sees itself as a very non-central example of the category "European".
Sort of like ostriches and birds. If you told me that there was a bird nearby, and I rounded a corner to find an ostrich, you'd be technically correct, but I'd still be surprised and probably not trust your warnings nearly as much as I had 10 minutes before.
I thought it'd be obvious that I didn't mean every Irish person would be bemused, but I should have been more explicit.
There's a difference between accepting Ireland as legally and bureaucratically part of Europe, or thinking it's politically or culturally useful to be in the E.U., and feeling that European-ness - however you choose to define it - is a part of our identity as a people.
My anecdotal experience (have lived in two European countries and one non-European country, learning the local languages and diving deep) is that European countries are about as "foreign" to Irish people as any other countries. There are exceptions, and it depends on the country, e.g., we're closer to the Poles now, and have a few fun stories about crates of Prazsky at the wedding in Gdansk.
Try out the experiment - ask an Irish friend or relation of yours if they feel like them and a Finnish / Belgian / Romanian person have something in common, or what they know about that country. My experience is that a lot of people (not everyone, and again, anecdotally) are very uncomfortable even with the idea of imagining that other places really exist.
Because I’m not entirely anti, to be honest!
- If someone told me they were from Europe, I'd assume they meant the continent.