Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.”įOR: Joyce really set my universe on its end. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: “Now … I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic “vision” over the tragic-how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce’s exhibitionististicicity is never so serious as when it is most outrageously comic. – Jonathan Franzen, in an interview with the GuardianįOR: Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. I needed a graduate thesis adviser to crack a whip over my head, and didn’t have one. – George Orwell, in a 1934 letter to Brenda SalkeldĪGAINST: Ulysses. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever. And I know I don’t love Ulysses as much as I am supposed to-but then again, I never cared even one-tenth so much for the Odyssey as I do for the Iliad.įOR: I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. – Ernest Hemingway, in a 1922 letter to Sherwood AndersonĪGAINST: I don’t like Hemingway. The woman’s son struck it rich in the Klondyke and the old woman went around writing her hands and saying ‘Oh my poor Joey! My poor Joey! He’s got so much money!’ The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other, but you never heard of an Irishman starving. Gertrude Stein says Joyce reminds her of an old woman out in San Francisco. It’s as if you’re encroaching on his area or it’s a given that he’s on your shoulder. The whole idea that he owns language as it is spoken in Dublin is a nonsense. If you’re a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.ĪGAINST: Ulysses could have done with a good editor.People are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written, but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it. He didn’t even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. Whether or not you look at these one star Amazon reviews of the novel first is entirely your business.įOR: Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. How would I know this, you ask? Well, they said so. In the final tally of opinions, we’ve come up with a tie-11 for and 11 against-so you will have to decide for yourself how you feel. In fact, many readers-and even many big-name writers-dislike or even loathe Joyce’s masterpiece. But it’s not as universally loved as it seems. Ulysses is constantly named by writers and readers as a life- and mind-changing novel, and frequently tops lists of best-ever books. It’s also Joyce’s birthday, by the way, and no-that isn’t a coincidence. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses-it was first serialized in The Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920-and today is the 96th anniversary of its very first publication in book form, by Sylvia Beach.
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