Subject: Re: farewell to arms
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 09:35:47 EDT
It's nice reading the exchange between Scottie and Tim. So much of both
your preferences for Hemingway over, to use one example, Joyce seems to
stem from Hemingway's "directness."
I think the thing with writers like Joyce is not that they're indirect.
It's that they're just representing the narrative from a different vantage
point, one trapped inside a character's head. This goes beyond just
writing first person. It tries to reflect all the eddies and currents in
human thought that really make up human consciousness. Finnegan's Wake,
Joyce said, he tried to write to the cadence of the river Liffey, and went
one night to a bridge and listened to the river and felt sure he was
writing what he wanted in that book.
By comparing the stream of the narrative to the sound of the river, and by
writing a narrative that employs, I think, 17 different languages, Joyce is
trying to represent the entire world that flows around Dublin (all of
Ireland, probably) and all its voices, sounds, thoughts...of course it's
going to sound like Babel. Parts of the whole rest of the world are more
in contact with Ireland than others, of course, so the languages and
outlook are still primarily European. But I still think that this is what
is going on. You could almost say Joyce is representing his own
consciousness as a displaced Irishman traveling through Europe around the
time of WW II.
So, to me, the point isn't that Hemingway is clear where Joyce is not.
Hemingway's subject is entirely different from Joyce's most of the time,
although he has passages that do attempt the same thing with far less
dramatic effects. We need to learn to read differently, to think
differently, to "get" Joyce.
If it's not worth the effort to you to begin with, you'll never know what
you're missing ;).
No one can explain this. It's just a process you need to force yourself
through.
Jim
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