James Joyce

[Chrome]

Today is the anniversary of Joyce's death ...

James Joyce

Tuesday January 14, 1941

The Guardian

With the death of James Joyce there passes the strangest and most original figure which Ireland gave to Europe in this generation. The ban imposed for years upon his "Ulysses" gave a notoriety to his name without disclosing his true stature and strength.

That he was a genuine artist, sincere, integrated, and profound is clear from the simplicity of his early short stories "Dubliners" and from the well-defined autobiographical narrative of "Portrait of the Artist."

In "Ulysses" he attempted the difficult task of presenting a complete picture of the life of the individual in our time, both conscious and subconscious, the single, peccant, groping man with the hard unrelenting universe around him.

In "Finnegan's Wake" (sic) he went farther, and in a strange inventive tongue he seemed to break through the barriers of time, though so complex is the medium that without commentary few can follow the meaning. In his background were the old traditions of Dublin and of the Roman Catholic Church. He broke with them both as far as a man can ever break with so deeply grounded a past, and portrayed the chaos of a disorganised world.

"Ulysses" has been sought by some readers because its pages contain words which rarely find their way into print. If that were Joyce's sole achievement there would be many of his countrymen of humbler intellectual pretensions who could outdo him. His originality lay in his discovery of a literary form for expressing the inconsequent complexity of the human mind and the dim resemblance that its migrations possessed to the orderliness of grammatical sentences or the appearances of time and space. He annihilated the ordinary and the normal, and revealed a jungle world of the mental and emotional reactions which may come over men in a single day. Down that road his genius travelled as far as it is possible to go.

If others had not strived for tradition or fought for an illusion, at least, of order, Joyce's nihilism would have been impossible, for his terms of reference would have disappeared. Europe appreciated him and yet he was at last locked out of Europe, as of Ireland, in some secret temple of his own mind, as removed from the great passage of events as his own countrymen are to-day.

[ghost of miles]

Man, I would love to be in Dublin come June 16 this year. When my wife and I bought our house several years ago, on June 16, I said, "Hey, we're closing on Bloomsday!" The realtor and the bank people looked at me with polite, restrained smiles... My wife was probably thinking, "Great, schmoe, we're gonna blow it at the last moment!"

bloomsday100

Edited January 13, 2004 by ghost of miles

[The Mule]

Good excuse to read "The Dead" again. God, that's some beautiful writing....

[Alexander]

Eye glove the rite eng ov Missed Her Germs Choice!

[Late]

For those interested in Ulysses, I'd recommend this critical text for complementary reading:

Description:

For James McMichael, Joyce's Ulysses invites the wide range of interpretations it has received: what it also does is to prod its interpreters to put the book to some just use. If Ulysses were more conventional than it is, McMichael claims, its readers could set more comfortable limits for themselves in their responses to it, limits that did not extend beyond Ulysses into their dealings with persons in the world. But what happens instead is that the singularly unconventional narrative structure of Ulysses keeps reminding them that the story they are being told about any of the characters is the same kind of story they tell themselves whenever they think about a person. It reminds them that every person needs to be responded to justly and that the justice of their response to any person depends on how justly they characterize that person in their thoughts. McMichael insists that it is justice that Joyce himself most wants. Distinguishing Joyce not only from the immature Stephen Dedalus but also from Ulysses' perfectly unresponsive narrator, this study describes Joyce's tacit but discomforting plea that Ulysses be judged not so much for its literary mastery as for the degree to which it is a just response to persons in need.

[medjuck]

I've always thought that if I got on one of those Desert Island Disc radio shows, Ulysses would be the book I would choose. Now If I could just come up with a list of only 10 discs....

And ex-student of mine tells me I once gave an assigment where the students had to read 100 pages of Ulysses. I didn't care which 100 pages. I have no memory of this but I hope it's true.