Re: waiting for the Miracle
Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Wed, 25 Mar 1998 10:37:09 -0800
Colbourne wrote:
> Could somebody please tell me a nice little honest something about
> Ulysses that will make me read it? I mean, what is it, too?
It's a book, more or less.
Nothing will make you read it. Especially not the book itself. It doesn't
need to be read, it doesn't want to be read, it just is. It lives up to
Joyce's maxim about the difference between art and dogma. It doesn't sit
there on the page telling you what it is, telling you what you're reading,
telling you what great and glorious message the egocentric author needs to
impart to you, kind reader. It just is. It's the real thing. Life itself.
>From heroism to masturbation and from Plumtree's Potted Meat to cuckoldry,
it's all in there. And the connections you bring to it will tell you more
about your own personal approach to life than about Joyce. Still, if you
don't read it it will make it harder for you to read most novels written
since.
What can you say about a book that trashes the concept of third person
omniscient, makes a mockery of the nineteenth century concept of the novel,
and blew the doors off the twentieth century, WHILST being as cinemagraphic
as any novel ever written (years before even talkies were invented) and
pretty much paved the way for the stream of consciousness to come flowing
through traditionally linear texts, and all the time cubistically mirroring
Homer's Odyssey?
That said, the more a priori knowledge you bring to it, the more rewarded
you'll be. And if you love words, wordplay and puns, it's hysterical. And if
you're multilingual, it's even better.
Malcs