Now just who the hell is Bunuel? Nice quote. It’s like saying as long as that person is wandering around looking for truth, that person is better than someone who has already found truth. That sounds like Bunuel had a hard time taking a stand. Did Bunuel choose to become a wanderer? Did he choose to give away his worldy possessions and sleep under a bridge? Truth may be hard to define. But Ulysses is not hard to define. It’s crap. Don’t snuggle up to a critics’ critique, read the book yourself. I will be proud of you if you make it past page 50. I am sure that your copy will end up in a heap in the corner. Use an overhand throw, it does far more damage to the binder.
To GM: I have no idea why current English teachers make their woefully unprepared students try to wade through Ulysses. Nor any idea why they try to make high school students read Shakespeare. (Hoping against hope?) Both are asking for the impossible, 99 times out of 100. So no disagreement on that point.
To everyone else, but specifically redman, who has asked who, besides literary critics and English teachers, could possiby read and understand/enjoy Ulysses, I can point to at least one example: my mother. No, she wasn’t raised by sadistic Jesuits. No, she is not Irish. Yes, she is well grounded in the classics and can quote Shakespeare to you. Yes, she speaks five current languages, in addition to having a good background in both Greek and Latin. Yes, she is 70 years old. But she’s a “normal” person in that she’s not an English teacher, lit crit or anything else. Just someone who was very well educated, who loves language and who happens to have something on the ball linguistically.
While such a background is relatively uncommon today, you have to remember that in the early part of the 1900s anyone who was going to go into literature was expected to have this background. It wasn’t just common, it was normal. It’s only since the 1960s or so, with all the “new” education that tries to do brilliant things like teach history without any dates or have people claim that they’re, say, experts on Freud without being able to read German and so on, that you find a such a paucity of preparation. So - nothing to do with intelligence - it’s no wonder that people get frustrated with Joyce.
But Mom likes him…!
I was going to stay out of this thread until I read the following: “Having both studied what Joyce said about Ulysses and having read the book several times, I can say with some assurance that your there is an extremely low probability of your interpretation intersecting with what Joyce was trying to say.” Anybody who operates under this notion of reading to discover “what so-and-so was trying to say” needs to read “The Intentional Fallacy” by Wimsatt and Beardsley. In short, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that what Joyce was “trying to say” is irrelevant. What matters is what he actually said: the text. That is, any attempt to uncover Joyce’s intent is essentially futile because all we have access to is what he actually wrote. Of course, this opens up an entirely new can of worms, one which has already been touched on by many posts in this thread: where is meaning created: in the text or in the reader? This question, in some form or another, has quite a history in literary studies, and your position in the spectrum almost necessarily dictates your thoughts on what is good literature and what is bad literature. And here is an interesting tidbit: Joyce was dictating the text of Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett at the former’s house. Joyce heard a knock at the door which Beckett did not. Joyce said, “Come in,” and Beckett, not realizing to whom Joyce was talking, wrote “come in” into the text. Later, while the two were going over the text, Beckett questioned the phrase. Joyce thought for a minute and concluded, “Leave it in.” Food for thought.
Tell me what you think is the greatest piece of literature ever written and then tell me why you think so.