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Ulysses: The Ultimate Niche Text
Not sure I'd agree, but some interesting points are raised here:
Nearly ninety years later, Joyce has certainly cemented his reputation, but with a decidedly more narrow audience than he sought. It seems that only in the academy does anyone bother with what Joyce meant, his work routinely distilled through faddish literary trends: semiotics, deconstruction, post-colonialism. He has achieved tenure, not immortality.
The reading public, or what remains of it, cares little for the middle-aged Jew (Leopold Bloom) and distraught young poet (Stephen Dedalus) who are the protagonists of Joyce’s messy masterpiece. The heroes of our time are Harvard “symbologists” and Hogwarts wizards. A complex epic that employs a maddeningly non-linear plot, multiple languages and allusions to pretty much the entire Western literary tradition just isn’t suited to our tastes.
I haven't read Ulysses , but I know enough about Joyce and the circumstances of the book's creation to highly doubt that Joyce's famous quote about ensuring immortality through enigmatic references was to be taken unironically. In any event, there's nothing stopping the common reader from ignoring all that and just enjoying the text if that's what she wants to do; Ulysses has survived because it's first and foremost a good read, hasn't it?
The rest of the article is pretty good, though. It's about a book called Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece , which is likened to "a reclamation project" on behalf of the everyday reader. Again, not sure how I feel about that, though the book sounds like it's fairly in-depth and gets beyond what "reclamation project" would imply.
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Yes, Ulysses is very funny and very beautiful, and those are big reasons for the book’s persistence. There have been plenty of simply arcane tomes we have completely and rightfully forgotten.
“Ulysses has survived because it’s first and foremost a good read, hasn’t it?”
This is putting it a little strongly. It is a bewilderingly fortifying read. If you care about possibility in fiction, you have to read it, because it does practically everything fiction has ever tried to do. But the motivation to keep plowing through it, to get to the humane and earthy fun parts, has to come from somewhere, and if it’s not academic motivation we’re talking about, it’s got to be that you’re a reader or writer who is deeply concerned with what fiction can do. So maybe even a smaller niche than the academy.
The article compares apples and oranges doesn’t it? It’s like saying Ulysses is nothing like a the modern romance novel. Comparisons should be drawn to serious fiction.
I would bet in 75 years more people will know the name James Joyce than Dan Brown or J.K Rowling.
The fact that the piece is even comparing best-sellers that came out in the past few years to a dense and complex book about a day in Dublin written almost a century ago should tell us all we need to know about Joyce’s endurance.
The piece compares those apples and oranges in terms of what’s popularly believed about current reader appetites, but the next paragraph, in introducing the book under review, rebuts the point — or at least offers a possible rebuttal to the point.
“I haven’t read Ulysses…”
I think you kind of proved their point by starting your commentary with that.
One of the things I’m proud of is having read Ulysses. But I couldn’t have done it without a lot of help (Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses) and a lot of uninterrupted time (a 2 week vacation). I find it gets better the farther I get away from it. And I would like to say I’ve dipped back in from time to time, but, alas, I’ve not. I feel it was a rich, fascinating, confusing, and tremendously stimulating experience. And that’s what I want from a read. I don’t really want to get into comparisons with other works – what’s the use. If something is considered a great work of art, then I’d like to find a way through it. That’s one reason I’ve abandoned book clubs – I want to read what I want to read. Although sometimes I want to discuss with others. Oh well.