Interesting.

You're overshooting your target a bit when you rant about Joyce being utterly readable. He is and he isn't. There're passages in Ulysses that will make thirteen-year-olds stitch up, but it's a very rare thirteen-year-old who will endure the whole thing. I'm reading Ulysses right now (a third attempt, and will finish it this time around, soon; I was too impatient before) and it's both utter delight _and_ there are dozens of pages difficult to get through, when you insist on closely reading the text. Those dozens of pages aren't boring, they're mostly terrific, but the density can be overwhelming. I think you know this and you talk about this a bit in your post, but in this comment you kinda gloss over this and overshoot your target. Insisting that Ulysses can be read as a stand-up delivery of a hilarious Irish comic is misleading. It isn't just shits and giggles; it's shits and giggles _and_ hard work (and much besides).

The rest of this comment is my opinion about your long post; it's about things I disliked in it, which isn't to say I disliked all of it - I agree with most of the rest, and think it's well-written. Take it for what it is; and if the tone seems too didactic, ignore the tone, I couldn't afford the time to fine-tune it.

Generally, I think you're not trying hard enough; to put it coarsely, _you're not highbrow enough_. You've put Joyce on the pedestal of the impossibly perfect and feel content with throwing the rest of literature to its feet. That is a terrible trap to fall into; it can rob you of appreciating brilliant things in other writers that you won't find in Joyce. It slowly saps you of the ability to understand and connect to true genius elsewhere. Most Joyceans in the academia, for example, are in this position, and their work is usually no good as the result. They start out with exactly the kind of all-encompassing rush of delight and certainty that _nothing can compare to this_ that you're feeling, and slowly work themselves into little more than extreme fanboyism, clad in respectable academic jargon.

Your comparisons are evidence of this shortcoming. You mention, when speaking of contemporaries, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. What about Kafka, Proust or Platonov? There is in Proust the frightening (because it's so effective) clarity of description, the ability to pinpoint an echo within yourself that you've never heard clearly until now and magnify it for you hundredfold, that is unmatched by anything in Joyce. There is in Kafka the ability to give voice to despair and desire that is unmatched by anything in Joyce. And yes, Joyce can also do what they can't, and you speak eloquently of that. But reading these writers properly (and others) may give you the same feelings of almost transcendent wonder and all-encompassing joy that reading Joyce gives you and me. I just don't think it's likely to happen in the frame of mind that throws Joyce up there into the clouds, to oversee the rest of the humanity. There isn't anything wrong by itself with subjectively feeling that Joyce is the greatest writer who's ever lived; it simply turns out to be pragmatically a bad idea to make this one of the pillars of one's approach to literature or art. It causes one's vision to slowly tunnelize. And there are signs in your post of that happening. Talking of "a higher level" is a giveaway; when people start explaining things in terms of higher and lower levels, it almost always means they don't _really_ understand their preferences well enough and can't _really_ justify them to themselves. "Levels" are weaselly words; I've caught myself abusing them many times, and now try to actively force myself to avoid them. And talking about "any other before or after" is just unjustifiable hubris. It's so easy to fall into this hubris with Joyce precisely because he's so great; but it's a trap nevertheless.

The best thing to do to a work of genius that seems to overflow you, sustain you, and define a large part of you from now on is to absorb it, cherish it, delight in it, learn from it, and overcome it. To overcome it doesn't mean to stop loving it, or even to treat it "objectively" whatever that means; it means to let it flow in yourself rather than overflow yourself; to balance it in your understanding and appreciation with other wonderful things foreign to it and even alien to it; and to see flaws where there're flaws (yet not exaggerate them) - and nothing is completely flawless. You're not highbrow enough because you've set up a pedestal with Joyce on it (and Beckett as an understudy) and this state of affairs is too complacent. You should be hard at work on overcoming your inner Joyce.

P.S. If you haven't, you ought to pick up and read Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_, as soon as possible.