Sebastian's still singing Baby You're A Rich Man.
Extra-special sarcastically, now that I'm down to the wire and demanding he do things like find something to say about The Dead that hasn't been done to...well, to death.
Speaking of which. The Dead is GODDAMN BEAUTIFUL. Actually, Dubliners is goddamn beautiful, beautiful in its ugliness, beautiful because it's clean and well-done and simply said yet so complex. I suspect I am going to be reading this book for the rest of my life. Never mind Portrait. Never mind Ulysses (I understand I speak blasphemy here). Definitely never mind Finnegan's Wake, that utterly insane millstone about my neck (seriously, Joyce, you fucker, what were you THINKING?! What was going on in your head? THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?! Did you write that thing just to screw with people?)
Never mind the people of higher intellectual capacity (and, possibly, snobbery) than myself who are going to sneer because my very favorite Joyce is the first and simplest one. Never mind any of that, that doesn't matter, just mind the fact that every time I read this book I get something new out of it, that I'm having trouble NOT reading this book anymore, that it may very well be something I read over and over and over again until I've got it memorized, at which point I'll have it in the background of my head for the rest of time.
Where it will clash mightily with the other two complete texts I've memorized, Pride and Prejudice and the script to Lilo and Stitch.
But I digress. Back to Dubliners. Why does it have this effect. miserable book that it is, on someone like me? I can't quite say. There's something in the way the man says things without saying them, the way things happen without the narration actually narrating, the way the subtext can be analyzed and analyzed again and analyzed yet again and still have something to say. The writing is clean, minimalist, mostly telling-instead-of-showing, to borrow the most hackneyed and overplayed line in all of writing criticism. And yet he shows you, he shows you and it's subtle and......
The strange thing about it is, hrh. How to say. Okay, so James Joyce was an expatriot. He left his country after trying to find a publisher for Dubliners and failing, and he never. Went. Back. Ever. And if you know this while you're reading Dubliners, you can see this...thing. It feels a bit like a tug-of-war between what he's trying to say and what he's saying, almost. His descriptions of Dublin are at times loving, they practically caress the page, they're so loving, and then he goes off about the brown streets and the scrabbling filth and takes the almost wistful beauty of a given scene and deliberately fucks it up. You can - f you're looking for it - you can very clearly delineate between these two very powerful emotional sets at war with one another. Within the mind of the author.
Possibly I'm reading into it, seeing something that isn't there. But then again, possibly not. Joyce left Dublin,but Dublin never left him. It's all he ever wrote about. Ever. Love-hate, hate-love, always that contrast and inner war. I wonder what that feels like, to be so desperately in love with a place and yet so full of hatred for it.
He was nuts, you know. Joyce. Crazy as the day is long, nobody much liked him, from the sound of it he was pretentious as fuck, too. But brilliant.
God, was he brilliant.
Back to Dubliners again, I've got more to say about Dubliners.
It's not boring, it can't possibly be boring because it's so ineffably human. They may mostly be bastards, the characters found in the Dubliners, but they're bastards you recognize and identify with and you can't help but love them, at least a little, because they're a cracked mirror of yourself and of everything. You don't need to know Irish history to see what and who these people are.
Admittedly, it helps to know Irish history. But you know what, learning about the colonialism aspect of his writing did nothing more but add depth to what was already there. I came to Dubliners knowing only the vaguest outline of the troubles of Ireland, and it still grabbed my heart and held it close because the people were so utterly fascinating and compelling and REAL. You can take Dubliners out of context. Why don't I recommend it? Because if you take it IN context, it suddenly takes on shading and color and depth that wasn't there before, and then you have to sit back and read it AGAIN. Because suddenly the stagnation and heartbreak of A Little Cloud, the anger and cycle of violence of Counterparts, the madness of Eveline, it all comes together into one big and glorious whole that is Ireland and the identity of Ireland and you find yourself Ohhhh!ing and suddenly thinking, NO WONDER!
I've not even touched on The Dead yet. Or details of the stories, even!
HOW CAN I POSSIBLY TAKE ALL OF THIS THAT I THINK AND FEEL AND STUFF IT INTO FIFTEEN MINUTES OF PROPER TALKING AND A GODDAMN MLA POWERPOINT?! HOW COULD ANYONE EXPECT ME TO?!
...this is what is known as the "frustration" aspect of the Process,
More later.
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