GR Overrated?

[Phillip Grayson]

Dave Monroe sed:
*"a perfesser of mine once said that Ulysses was the greatest novel
he could never enjoy.

**"His favorite novel, meanwhile, is Finnegans Wake."*

That sounds at first blush like a very English-professor-y thing to say, but
I can totally buy it.  The original article is pretty goofy but the Joyce
stuff seems trenchant enough, if ultimately unsuccessful.  I think with
intellects like Joyce's or, say, Nabokov's, there's maybe a tendency for
them to take too supreme a pose to their work (paring fingernails, et c) or
to at least seem to to mortal men.

I think with Joyce there's a lot to contradict this: specifically, that
despite the overly-ordered-ness of *Ulysses* as a novel, the prose itself
and each individual chapter seems very welcoming to the grandeur and mystery
of literature, and that, re: my statement above, *Finnegans Wake* seems like
a very deliberate leap into this stuff.  Writing as if you are something
very small.

phllp




On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 8:45 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Henry M <scuffling at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Canonical books I did not enjoy include The Iliad and The Sound and
> > the Fury, and, although I did read Ulysses with some degree of
> > technical interest, it wasn't fun for me. I maintain that this doesn't
> > reflect badly on Homer, Faulkner, Joyce, or me."
>
> ... a perfesser of mine once said that Ulysses was the greatest novel
> he could never enjoy.
>
> His favorite novel, meanwhile, is Finnegans Wake.
>
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