Ulysses
I've been reading James Joyce's Ulysses.
I've been meaning to read it for ages, and have had my copy for over 35 years without reading it. I'm not even sure when or where I bought it.
I'd read Portrait of the artist as a young man, and had tried reading Finnegan's wake, but had given up.
But Ulysses is on a lot of those lists of "books to read before you die", and since i had a copy, I thought I ought to read it.
I've heard it's supposed to be "modern" or "modernist", and I think I must be very postmodern then, because all the time I'm reading it I'm conscious that all the characters in it are contemporaries of my grandparents. The action in the book takes place a week after my grandparents were married, and I picture them wearing the kind of clothes my grandparents wore back then, and the pubs and newspaper offices as ornate and Edwardian. At one point there are three girls looking after two little boys playing on the beach in sailor suits. My father had a sailor suit, and though he doesn't have one in this picture, that's what contemporary clothes looked like. That's my grandmother Lily Hayes, my father, and his older sister Vera.
Of course Ulysses was set in Ireland, and my grandparents lived in Johannesburg at that time, but the clothes they wore would have been much the same, and so when reading it i get the impression that I'm peeping, like a voyeur, into my grandparents' thoughts. Not modern.
I was introduced to James Joyce by my mentor in most things literary, Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection. He it was who had lent me Portrait of the artist as a young man. But then i went to the University of Natal, where the English Department was filled with dedicated Leavisites, and oe of them advised a friend of mine not to read Ulysses as it would impair his critical faculties, and it would be wasting tome that could be better employed reading D.H. Lawrence. The same friend swore he had seen a copy of Ulysses on the professor's desk, and the only explanation we could think of was that he must have confiscated it from a student for his own good, to preserve his critical faculties.
The English department despised most of the things Brother Roger turned me on to -- Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, and the Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes. Anyway, I thought it was high time I read Ulysses but it's taking me a long time. I usually only read a few pages at a time, and though I can appreciate Joyce's bewildering variety of styles, I have little clue about why he is using them. Perhaps that's a sign of my critical faculties being eroded already.
I've been meaning to read it for ages, and have had my copy for over 35 years without reading it. I'm not even sure when or where I bought it.
I'd read Portrait of the artist as a young man, and had tried reading Finnegan's wake, but had given up.
But Ulysses is on a lot of those lists of "books to read before you die", and since i had a copy, I thought I ought to read it.
I've heard it's supposed to be "modern" or "modernist", and I think I must be very postmodern then, because all the time I'm reading it I'm conscious that all the characters in it are contemporaries of my grandparents. The action in the book takes place a week after my grandparents were married, and I picture them wearing the kind of clothes my grandparents wore back then, and the pubs and newspaper offices as ornate and Edwardian. At one point there are three girls looking after two little boys playing on the beach in sailor suits. My father had a sailor suit, and though he doesn't have one in this picture, that's what contemporary clothes looked like. That's my grandmother Lily Hayes, my father, and his older sister Vera.
Of course Ulysses was set in Ireland, and my grandparents lived in Johannesburg at that time, but the clothes they wore would have been much the same, and so when reading it i get the impression that I'm peeping, like a voyeur, into my grandparents' thoughts. Not modern.
I was introduced to James Joyce by my mentor in most things literary, Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection. He it was who had lent me Portrait of the artist as a young man. But then i went to the University of Natal, where the English Department was filled with dedicated Leavisites, and oe of them advised a friend of mine not to read Ulysses as it would impair his critical faculties, and it would be wasting tome that could be better employed reading D.H. Lawrence. The same friend swore he had seen a copy of Ulysses on the professor's desk, and the only explanation we could think of was that he must have confiscated it from a student for his own good, to preserve his critical faculties.
The English department despised most of the things Brother Roger turned me on to -- Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, and the Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes. Anyway, I thought it was high time I read Ulysses but it's taking me a long time. I usually only read a few pages at a time, and though I can appreciate Joyce's bewildering variety of styles, I have little clue about why he is using them. Perhaps that's a sign of my critical faculties being eroded already.