From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Subject: Re: Q about _Gravity's_Rainbow_
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 10 Apr 92 16:45:48 CDT

In article <1992Apr10.195958.25042@watserv1.waterloo.edu> msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris) writes:
>
>                              Friday, the 10th of April, 1992
>
>Joe Green writes:
>   No, Ulysses is the greatest comic novel in English.  This means that
>   it is the greatest novel.  
>Umm, I can't quite share the intensity of this enthusiasm, Joe, but I'll
>allow that time and more readings might change me. The thing is,
>I have a personal reservation about Joyce that goes something like what
>you were arguing against. My problem focusses on the Wake. I maybe
>know it better than I do Ulysses. I've read the Wake between 2 and 4 times
>(depending on how you count), Ulysses but once. I am very willing to
>acknowledge Joyce's genius for language at every step, that he
>exhibits complete technical control over his writing. But (not trying
>to be too Paglia-tive) in the dichotomy between form (or style) and
>content, I feel the content is missing. The Wake feels to me like it
>is all style. Well, not quite. Let me (try to) explain: In Dubliners I
>get a strong sense of the sterility of lives within a modern mass society,
>lives seem to be small and contained to me. There is a thematic content
>to Dubliners that I can carry away from it. Perhaps as well with Portrait
>and artistic concentration and exile. But, in the Wake, once one is past
>the strangeness of the experiment, and even past the exquisite beauty
>of the language, there are the Great Themes which are sounded: recurrence
>in history of mythical archetypes, the fall, resurrection, brother conflict,
>and the Ewig-Weibliche. My trouble is that I never have gotten past the
>impression that Joyce isn't artistically ``playing'' or ``dancing''
>with these themes the same way he dances with his words. I think you
>once said here, Joe, that style is everything (I don't remember if that one
>was said in a sincere voice or not). For me, style is a lot. Reading Joyce
>first taught me that it is more than I had thought. But, I still
>hold that content is a lot as well. Finnegans Wake, as much as I love it,
>as beautiful as I find it, just rings a little hollow for me, brittle
>maybe, and that *feeling* (a feeling which may well change in time)
>probably colors my memory of Ulysses as well.
>
>          Mike Morris
>     (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

In a way it is infantile babbling and that is part of what is so
interesting to me.  Possibilities of meaning and affirmation before
the "ego is fixed."  The Wake seems an act that affirms the possibility
that of ourselves we are not knowers.  It hints at the possibilty
of transvaluation of meaning.  So, ok, I admit it.  I think that
something is speaking through Joyce -- language before it is coerced
by ideology, consciousness before it is differentiated and then
(this is what is important) consciousness after it is differentiated
and after it returns to a plenum of fulness and emptiness achieved
without the ego appropriating objects and persons entirely for itself.
It means to me the "blown-out" Nirvana that Kerouac longs for but
achieved without blowing out and expelling the real (bugs, ticks,
other people). It seems to me to be consciousness blessing its own body
and even accepting its end.  It seems the gibberish of generation
and the phatic that escapes repression.  I also think that if a 
river could talk this is how it would talk.

It cheers me up a hell of a lot.  
-- 
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