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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (196)	10/17/1999 12:50:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

CharleyMane, I think the key words here are "most influential." There is hardly a writer in the English language today who has not borrowed techniques and themes from Joyce. (Hemingway, for better or for worse, has had a similar, if opposite, influence.) As for "Ulysses," try reading it again. I kid you not. I picked it up the other day, and was amazed to find how much easier it was to read than when I first tried it! I think that we have become so accustomed to the Joycean style, thanks to the fact that so many other writers have employed elements of it, that it no longer seems that strange & obscure. I never could get "Finnegan's Wake," either. In fact, Joyce's assumption that I should spend all that time deciphering each word in the text irritated me. But now I view "Finnegan's Wake" not as a "novel," but as a workshop, a literary grab-bag, a giant crossword puzzle, a compendium of suggested techniques and literary turns that other writers can use & adapt to their own purposes, if they so choose. Don't try to READ Finnegan from start to finish; nibble at it, sip at it, here & there. Just relax and have a little fun, without worrying about whether you "understand" it all or not. As for the question of whether "Ulysses" is THE most important book of the 20th century -- well, I personally am not into ranking great books. A great book is a great book is a great book, as Gertrude Stein might have said. But "Ulysses" does have a lot going for it. A modern retelling of a great old story, which, if you are a Jungian, you might say is embedded in our collective unconscious. The virtuosity of the language is incredible. So is the emotional range: everything here from High Seriousness to Slapstick... To put your question another way: can you think of any other modern novel that hits so many bases?