Robert E. Lee should read the Richard Ellemann biography of Joyce before assaulting people with trite comments, useless pop trivia (actually, Lee, it is 'the Dubliners'--though not in the title, 'the' has become commonplace when speaking of the Dubliners), and other atrocities.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tabac
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows a Joyce who has matured far beyond the artist who wrote the Dubliners as a hostile retort to the Irish culture that framed his self-image (except, of course, for 'The Dead', which shows the germs of sympathy that would be cultivated in Ulysses and, finally, in Finnegans Wake).
I recall the forbiddingly difficult third episode of Ulysses, as well was the seemingly endless array of mindless pleasures in Finnegans Wake. But, in spite of all the criticism surrounding him, Joyce is a salutary splash of water in the face of modern literature. In the opening episode of Ulysses, for example, the sun is not rising over the sea, it is 'merrying over the sea'. It's the attention to detail that makes Joyce, not a 'literary' genius, but a man whose works contain, within themselves, a rainbow's manifold of genius. Anyway, all three novels are fraught with riddles (especially the latter two), and it goes without saying that, not only has Joyce changed the way we read literature, he has changed the way we read the world around us. After all, the fluid flow of Finnegans Wake is 'the brook of life'.
