Ulysses, by, James Joyce. Do y'all even? · 3:34am Jun 25th, 2015
Have you heard of this book? I know it is famous, but I was surprised to find a fair number of my friends offline have never heard of it (though, actually, not so surprising, considering I have like no literature-interested friends, save one--and that one didn't even really know of the book).
Anyway, to those who have heard of it, and those who have not, Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce (no fretting, I am not gunna lecture, just a whit of info., hopefully peak some interest, then done). Published in 1922... confused reception... praising and condemning alike... banned in America at its publication... banned a lot of places, actually... labeled lewd (one of the main characters masturbating in a scene was probably the biggest issue with that)... said to be too difficult to read and is nonsense. A monument of Modernist Literature (in my opinion the last great literary movement--containing such authors as Kawabata and Kafka as well), and radical style--for its style it is very often, almost exclusively, associated with great difficulty, which is really too bad, for it is a marvelous joy to read. Its "stream-of-conscious" style is what causes, I think, a lot of its difficulty, but that is also what makes it so great, for, with almost no narrator interference, the reader gets a stark peek at the character's hidden world inside their mind.
There's a lot more to this book, but I don't what to go too into it and bore anypony anymore than I have already.
This is the cover of the copy I am reading (a copy I find very exhaustive in introduction and endnotes--very helpful!):
I just wanted to share about this book to fellow readers and writers to take a crack at if y'all are so inclined. It's a daunting book, but so rewarding!
I heard about this book and I decided to read a bit. You see, in my cottage has a small upstairs bit that cuts off into an inside balcony. On that upstairs bit is a a few small shelves full of books that came with the house. I saw Ulysses one day and read the first few pages. In short, I didn't know what the fuck was going on, so I went back to reading about flannel designs.
3206914 Nice!
It's not everyone's cup of tea, so I don't blame ya
What do you find rewarding about it?
Ulysses was the keystone of a long, patient conspiracy led by Ezra Pound to take over the power structure of English literature. He spent years talking to all the new writers he could find, gathering together those whom he thought he could use, starting up new literary journals, and finding patrons to provide the funding, until in the mid-twenties he directly or indirectly controlled or influenced enough people to encourage his writers to write really weird stuff, and promote it ruthlessly. This included TS Eliot's "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land", and "Ulysses". Pound actually revised "The Waste Land". The other writers he worked with include William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, and I don't even remember who all else. Most of the people we now recognize as major modernist writers and poets. (He also worked on William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, but they didn't get with the program.)
So when James Joyce and T.S. Eliot started publishing, they were published with Pound's help, in journals or by publishing houses Pound had helped establish, and got rave reviews from Pound's friends. If this large and widespread group of people hadn't all cooperated, we'd never have heard of Eliot or Joyce, or of literary modernism.