[ExI] John C. Wright Interview

[Lee Corbin]

Damien writes

> At 08:07 PM 1/24/2008 -0800, Lee quotes John C. Wright:
> 
>> > If you want to hear a song with a tune whose words ring out
>> >about the bright and glorious things in life, swords and strongholds, kings
> 
> Swords and kings be buggered. That's what I say.

Yes, yes, but that's not any of the provocative parts of his opining.

1) Mr. Joyce (in "Ulysses") uses an experimental stream-of-nonsense style in
    order to put across his modernized version of the Odyssey: instead of acts
    of heroic valor... in this obscene modern book we have Leopold Bloom,
    cuckold, drifting through turn-of-the-century Dublin. We see him do things
    like defecating in an outhouse, or pointing out a dent in a friend's hat. 
    All is surrounded by verbal gibberish.

"Gibberish"?  This sounds like a falsifiable claim that must be either accepted
or rejected.  I recall that when I was 15 I thought that classical music was
almost entirely a pretence, and that it did not deliver the essence of  musical
enjoyment as did the one or two other kinds of music I appreciated.
(A year or so later I found out differently.)

    It ["Ulysses"] has the same relationship to a real novel as a Rorschach
    blot has to a real painting. As in a Rorschach blot, any meaning,
    including parallels to the Odyssey, can be invented freely by critics
    and students of literature and shoehorned to fit.

Again, this is either the case or it is not. No? 

   Naturally, this frees critics and students of literature from the onerous burden
   of having to study and understand a work of literature before commenting on it.
    In effect, they get the same reward for no effort, where this book is concerned:
    small wonder it is highly regarded in their field.

There are a number of aspects of all this that require explanation. First, (unlike the
case with music) we do know that a certain amount of post-modernism really and
truly is self-deception.  Perhaps Joyce just anticipated some very ugly and dumb
future trends.

I'd really appreciate the opinion of anyone who's read the book, or has some
independent knowledge about it.

Lee