My middle son, a newly minted second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, has a 3D printer on the coffee table in the living room of his apartment in Maryland. On Friday he flew home for a brief visit and brought me a gift – a 3D-printed bust of James Joyce:
Joyce’s glasses look a little “wobbly,” in Michael’s words (“Wipe your glosses with what you know”), the result of some technical problem I didn’t understand, but it’s an unmistakable likeness of the Irishman. Michael brought with him another hefty piece of impedimenta: the recently published Cambridge Centenary Ulysses. Its 963 pages tip the scales at seven pounds. When I was young, almost half a century after its original publication in 1922, you proved your literary chops by reading Joyce’s novel, or at least claiming to, and then bragging about it. Lots of snobbery, the way people might talk about having read JR or Gravity’s Rainbow today. It was a litmus test of bookish smarts and sensibility. Today, any reasonably literate person can read Ulysses for fun and profit. It took Joyce almost a century to teach us how to read his novel.
The warm
heart of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom -- Stephen
Dedalus is an insufferable prig -- and the heart of Bloom is the death of his
son, Rudy, eleven years earlier (1893 in Joyce’s fictional timeline). He sees a
vision of the boy at the conclusion of the “Circe” episode:
“(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a
fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with
glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads
from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM
“(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY
“(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes
on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has
diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with
a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)”
I don’t know
a sadder scene in all of literature.
1 comment:
Pardon me but a reasonably literate person could have read Ulysses back then too, without help from crib or crutch, and without boasting after; I know because I was and I did.
I never have seen any snob-value in making claims to have read this or that book. Odd because a great friend of mine was an unquenchable boaster along those lines. I didn't have to pretend to be unimpressed; his brags floated past with no effect on me at all. But I loved listening to him anyway, because my ears were always up to catch titles I couldn't have heard of any other way.
It was from him I first heard of William Gaddis. This was four or five years after The Recognitions was published. More on instinct than information, I made a mental note, double underlined. And when I chanced to find a used paperback for sale I snapped it up. A nice fat squeezable book it was, and at a trial as pleasant as Tristram Shandy for opening to a random page, puzzling out what's going on, and pursuing the thread through its twists, until you fall off gasping. After six months of this (not every day, of course!) I settled down to read it from start to finish: in 50-to-60-page gulps, it took about a week; and someday I hope to tell you why I regard and recommend it highly, I do.
But now hastening to what came next in this reader's life. Gaddis published his second novel, JR, a full ten years after his first. This time I was ready for him. For preview, Harper's had run an excerpt, which made me shout with laughter; though the two or three letter-writers in a subsequent issue only carped about the "difficulty" of Gaddis's style. What difficulty?! Unfamiliarity, sure, but it takes all of a minute for that to dissolve, and then the voices come clear and the scene takes shape. It is a pure narrative style, in a vein of comedy. I read the novel at once, only sorry that the forward propulsion meant I'd reach the end too soon.
I don't think Gaddis ever wrote as well again. He wrote several more novels, but not like the first two. He seemed to have spent his force. The later novels contain the occasional plum, but structurally they're tossed-off, ready-work. And this may be the key to why The Recognitions and JR still have the reputation of being difficult works: they clearly cannot have been easy to write. But it doesn't follow that they be hard to read.
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