[ExI] Joyce (was: John C. Wright Interview)

[John K Clark]

"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>

> Molly Bloom's rapturous closing lines that
> complete ULYSSES are about as  justly
> famous as anything in 20th century literature.

That is quite simply untrue, Molly Bloom is almost completely unknown to
the human race, as is every word Joyce ever wrote. For everyone who has
heard of Molly Bloom a hundred have heard of Mike Hammer, a thousand
have heard of Hercule Periot, and ten thousand have heard of Harry Potter.
The Molly Bloom meme is very weak indeed.

Yes, I understand that there are those who like to cut themselves off from
the culture they actually live in and would say the examples I cite are not
literature and they know they are not literature because they are popular.
So I suppose you could say Molly Bloom is famous in the category of
literary characters that are almost completely unknown.

> Does this look like gibberish to anyone except a Philistine?

You might be amused by "The Postmodernism Generator":

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

In less than a second it can crank out a wonderful Postmodern essay
complete with footnotes with grand titles like:

"The Futility of Class: Cultural nationalism in the works of Mapplethorpe"

Hit the generate button again and you could be the first person in the world
to read something like:

"The Context of Collapse: Material nihilism and the postcapitalist
paradigm of discourse"

I wonder how difficult it would be to make a generator that churns out
literature in the style of Joyce; simulating the mathematical and logical
puzzles in his books wouldn't be much of a challenge, Martin Gardner
thought they were fourth rate.

Reading these Postmodern "essays" can be pretty funny at first, but by the
second paragraph my eyes start to glaze over, just like it does when I try
to read Joyce. That could be my fault as literature is not my forte' but
there is reason to suggest it may not be entirely my mistake; Mr. Joyce has
not stood the test of time very well.

A century ago only a tiny minority of specialists appreciated the works of
Joyce and Einstein, today it's still the same with Joyce while Einstein has
entered the popular culture. It's true that even today most don't understand
exactly what Einstein did (although many more understand Einstein than
understand Joyce) but Einstein wasn't writing about the human condition,
Joyce was or claimed to be, and that is inherently more accessible. And yet
after a century Joyce is as big an enigma as ever where Einstein is not. If
Joyce had something new and deep to say about being alive you'd think it
would have sunk in by now; and if he had found a new way to entertain
you'd think people would read him for fun, but people only read him when
they are teachers or students in a class about him. That is also true of 
other
classics like Beowulf but the difference is that at one time Beowulf was
popular and people listened to it for fun, but Joyce was as unpopular a
century ago as he is today.

But I could be wrong.

  John K Philistine

PS: I understand Joyce doesn't like punctuation, but why does he cling to
the bourgeois convention of putting spaces between words?
heshouldhavewrittenanentirebooklikethiswhatajoythatwouldbetoread