a kind of a reply to Jon
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:24 +0000
I’m not sure, Jon, what you mean by ‘rhetorical writing’ &
how it differs from the task facing the writer of fiction.
The latter still has to have a clear idea in his mind of the images,
the conversations, the actions of his story & how to set them
down in the most transmissable way.
Finnegans Wake may be the delight of American academics
but who else ? The very idiosyncratic nature of the language
makes it rapidly wearisome to most of us & finally inaccessible
to all but the most obsessional Joyceans. As a practising shrink
I remember how diverting I initially found the language of
schizophrenics with all its charming distortions, clang associations
& so on. And much of Joyce’s language is like that. But quite soon
one becomes aware of its essential emptiness & banality. Its extreme
self-centredness makes it, after a while, extraordinarily boring.
Which is what, for me at least, Joyce’s later stuff also becomes.
Without subscribing to any Jungian nonsense about a collective
unconscious I feel there *is* a deep pool of common experiences
shared by most people in our culture & that it is into this that
the great writer taps. I still cannot see how individual, private
projections do anything but dissipate the writer’s original vision.
Scottie B.