James Joyce
From Oneiropedia
“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
~ James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce is sometimes called a fraud, sometimes a genius, but always an Irishman.
Style
James Joyce took modernism and exploded it like a rusty bombshell, to steal from Allen Ginsberg. He wrote two books, his last two, that nobody reads and everybody praises. Ulysses, in fact, is often called the greatest book of all time. Probably because of all the hot, sexy, prurient yes-yesing in the last chapter. Finnegans Wake would probably usurp Ulysses' position, if anybody had ever managed to read and understand the first page. Unfortunately, it's written in an as-yet-undeciphered language called "drunken Irishman language." Or maybe it's profoundly allegorical. Until they find the Joyce-etta stone, we'll never know. But A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we can say authoritatively, just rocks. Because it's readable! In English! It's about Stephen Dedalus, one crazy mofo who goes on some coming-of-age journey of bildungsroman discovery. That involves prostitutes. And Parnell. And Catholicism. And villanelles. Did I mention prostitutes?
Work
- Dubliners, a short story collection
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Ulysses
- Finnegans Wake
People who have read Finnegans Wake
- Not Sylvia Plath
- Joyce himself???
