Appreciate all this, as usual, but especially the bit about James Joyce. I've read too many bits on him (and Proust, Sartre, Hegel, etc) where the commentator tries to insist that the reputation for difficulty is overblown. I know it's uncool to acknowledge your struggle with a text, but to pretend some books can be understood intuitively on a first go just feels dishonest.
Haha yeah the New Yorker/Atlantic critical line on Ulysses (prevailing anti-elitism being what it is) is like "It's nothing really -- just a touching story about a marriage, about a guy going for a walk around Dublin -- really it's easy if you think about it!" I don't think they should build it up to be some impossible modernist talmud, it isn't that either, but come on now.
I definitely also have my share of complex feelings about it though. I do love it, it has some of my favorite sentences in the world, but more than any other modern masterpiece that relationship feels a bit... well "abusive" is much too strong a word but it does feel sort of like the violent imposition of another consciousness, one that makes you wade through teethgrinding boredom, bad puns, accumulation of detail, all those babytalk compound words. I can't look up at night without thinking of his heaventree of stars. But does he have the right to so thoroughly override my brain like that? With my favorite novels it feels like another consciousness has given me a great gift. Ulysses is sort of like being given a gift that is indeed great and life-changing, but in the form of a finicky and delicate tropical fish.
Appreciate all this, as usual, but especially the bit about James Joyce. I've read too many bits on him (and Proust, Sartre, Hegel, etc) where the commentator tries to insist that the reputation for difficulty is overblown. I know it's uncool to acknowledge your struggle with a text, but to pretend some books can be understood intuitively on a first go just feels dishonest.
Haha yeah the New Yorker/Atlantic critical line on Ulysses (prevailing anti-elitism being what it is) is like "It's nothing really -- just a touching story about a marriage, about a guy going for a walk around Dublin -- really it's easy if you think about it!" I don't think they should build it up to be some impossible modernist talmud, it isn't that either, but come on now.
I definitely also have my share of complex feelings about it though. I do love it, it has some of my favorite sentences in the world, but more than any other modern masterpiece that relationship feels a bit... well "abusive" is much too strong a word but it does feel sort of like the violent imposition of another consciousness, one that makes you wade through teethgrinding boredom, bad puns, accumulation of detail, all those babytalk compound words. I can't look up at night without thinking of his heaventree of stars. But does he have the right to so thoroughly override my brain like that? With my favorite novels it feels like another consciousness has given me a great gift. Ulysses is sort of like being given a gift that is indeed great and life-changing, but in the form of a finicky and delicate tropical fish.