[ExI] Joyce

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Tue Jan 29 03:50:02 UTC 2008


Damien writes

> But since you're offering us your literary criticism, John, it's fair 
> to ask for a list of the works of James Joyce that you read before 
> pillorying them.

It may be fair, but it would be rather pointless. I am quite certain
that if John and I forced ourselves to read Finnegan's Wake or
Ulysses, we would be in the main merely confirmed in our lack
of appreciation.

It's more interesting to think about what would have happened
if John or I had had nothing else to read when we were 18 or
19, and had thereby been forced to re-read all of Joyce's
novels many times. At some point *anything* that one studies
long enough becomes quite interesting. 

I am reminded about what a certain chess teacher once had the
audacity to say (and to one of my students, no less). "Why do we
play chess?"  The answer he provided was, "We play chess 
because it is hard work". (!) You see, over a long enough time he
had come to treasure the self-discipline and hard work for *itself*
and had the narrowness to suppose that his answer applied to 
everyone.

No, we study chess (or anything else) because it is interesting, and
we play chess because it is fun. True, eventually, serious players get
beyond the raw "fun" stage, and we see the same thing happening
with literary types.

But for anyone to castigate as buffoons or philistines people who
haven't expended that much work on a particular art form is pretty
myopic. For example, if someone tells me that chess is a silly game
played on a small 8x8 board having no significance, I can only 
retort that "there is no accounting for taste".  For me to say that
these "buffoons" simply have not played enough chess or studied
it enough to appreciate it is completely wrongheaded.  I *can* 
say that "silliness" or "beauty" lies in the eye of the beholder,
and that their pronouncement had no objective truth.

Lee




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