[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

RAT BOUNCE rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com: Non-member submission from [jeffrey jones <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>]

Received: from dub-img-10.compuserve.com (dub-img-10.compuserve.com
[149.174.206.140])
	by parachute.whirl-i-gig.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA14781
	for <rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com>; Sat, 16 Jan 1999 15:02:07 -0500
Received: (from root@localhost)
	by dub-img-10.compuserve.com (8.8.6/8.8.6/2.17) id NAA01630
	for rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com; Sat, 16 Jan 1999 13:58:13 -0500 (EST)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 13:57:04 -0500
From: jeffrey jones <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>
Subject: RAT Word
Sender: jeffrey jones <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>
To: "INTERNET:rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com" <rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com>

Message text written by INTERNET:rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
>A few months earlier, right after some literary critics announced their
Top
100 works of literature for the century, Ulysses by James Joyce was briefly
Amazon.com's Number One.  I got a graduate degree in literature a couple
decades ago. Ulysses is on my bookshelf, but I'm still following the
instruction of an undergrad professor of mine who said that no one should
read that book until one has had twenty or more years of study in
literature.  Now that the Web is here, I'm afraid I'll never make it.<

Nick:

Your professor was  either lazy-minded or condescending (or both), but in
any event, wrong on any number of counts, two of the most obvious being
that Ulysses is one of the seminal works of the century and that no one who
is truly passionate and serious about reading and writing would ever
recommend against opening a book.  I for one am forever opening Henry
James... and then of course shutting him up again.

That having been said, reading Joyce does pose particular challenges which
may or may not be to your liking. Over and above the dense thickets of
prose, there's the matter of his formidable erudition, which is built right
into the text. What this means (or at least, meant for me) is that Joyce 
demands that you pore over his words as you would a poem or a text in
another language. Reading him requires perhaps more chewing than we're used
to nowadays, but it was Joyce's own approach to reading and writing, and he
clearly wanted to force the reader to become a kind of second instance of
himself. The Wake is of course unreadable any other way, but I spent about
a month some thirty years ago on little more than a page of the Wake, in
the reference Room of the Honnold Library, with about ten other books
(dictionaries, exegeses of the Wake, and so forth) spread before me,
travelling down an infinite Celtic regress of language. A  kind of monastic
heaven; the most enjoyable single act of reading of my life.

Joyce himself said of the Wake words to the effect that he'd spent 20 years
writing it and therefore expected anyone who wanted to read it to spend an
equivalent 20 years. Ironically, of course, this complete reverses your
professor's position. But what's most galling to me about his "instruction"
is that I think one really has to give oneself oneself to Joyce in order to
appreciate him, and this is an exercise that's particularly suited to
20-year olds. Old farts like me just don't have enough flexibility and
juice to fall in love with a writer the way we did. I doubt I would have
the patience or the impressionability to reJoyce again. And that's a great
pity.

So I, Buck Mulligan like, propose we hunt down this professor of yours and
punch him in the snout for Stephen Daedalus.

Jeffrey M. Jones