Tag Archives: james joyce

Booking Through Thursdays. Wake Up!

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This week’s prompt:

What’s the hardest/most challenging book you’ve ever read? Was it worth the effort? Did you read it by choice or was it an assignment/obligation?

Didn’t have to think hard about this one — it was James Joyce’s Ulysses.

And I read it by accident.

I read voraciously as a kid, and it must have been summer, because it was mostly during the summer that I used to mine the Oxford town library for things to read.

And I ended up taking home this enormous book, probably because the title seemed vaguely familiar . . . and yes, I read it. Every word.

I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13.

I had no idea what it was about. lol

I should probably re-read it . . .

(Side note — it just occurred to me —Finnegans Wake (koff) is one of those books where you don’t have to say the author’s name . . . like War and Peace or The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick . . . I wonder if there are any books written in the last 20 years that are that much a part of the lexicon?)

Books that are really ideas

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Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (How to discuss books that one hasn’t read), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.

Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:

“LI” is livres inconnus (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” livres parcourus (books glanced at); “LE” livres dont jai entendu parler  (books he has heard discussed) and LO les livres que jai oubli (books he has read but forgotten).

Tahourdin next recounts that James Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.

[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

I suppose we should delight in his honesty.

I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?

I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.

Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?

Where are its roots?

Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:

When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.

I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .

Do scholars have rights?

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You may have read about the tussle between James Joyce‘s heirs — in particular, his grandson — and the scholars who want more and freer access to Joyce’s writings — including, of course, his personal writings.

Here’s a Globe and Mail article about it, linked today by Booksquare.

It’s an interesting conundrum, but on balance, I’m on the grandson’s side. I daresay he’s a curmudgeon. But I don’t believe, for a second, the claim made by those he’s fighting that this will “drive young scholars away from marvels of James Joyce’s writing.” That’s a red herring — it’s intended to make this sound like a noble fight, when really it’s just a bunch of guys who are irritated that there’s a bump in the road to prestige and tenure.

Joyce wrote books. He wrote them for the public. Anyone who wants to marvel at his writing can just read his books.

Ironic that deconstructionist scholarship opens the door to inhuman attitudes toward writers’ personal lives. Nobody can just leave Joyce’s books to stand as discreet works of art. Nooooo. They have to be dissected, all their parts pinned to a board and labeled and cross-referenced to minutiae about his personal life.

I nearly burned all my journals, once. I didn’t do it. But I might, yet. I can understand the impulse to frustrate the inappropriately curious, the people who assume an entitlement without regard to another’s dignity or privacy . . . or, even more heretical yet, another’s wish to control his own life’s narrative . . .