I have read Ulysses three times. I have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man twice. I have read Dubliners and Exiles. Like so many others I have tried and failed to read Finnegans Wake. I'm sure that if I really put my mind to it and was willing to put forth the time and effort I could get through this book. A measure of how difficult it would be is the website Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury which features 79000 annotations of this book. Another Finnegans Wake website with text has a similar number of annotations. I'm not sure I see the point of working 17 years to write a book so few are capable of reading.
       While I have not read the book I have read many, many literary analysis of this novel. (see Finnegans Wake: What It's All About) One notable thing is the name ALP(a laughable party) as the wife of the main character HCE (Here Comes Everybody). This is a pretty good indication of Joyce's rather unflattering portrayal of women. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the two most important female characters are the mother whom Stephen Deadalus has contempt for because of her extreme religiosity and the street girl who deflowers the adolescent Stephen. In Ulysses the most important female character is Molly Bloom whose rambling and irrational novel ending soliloquy is dominated by sexual thoughts. ( see also Molly Bloom Soliloquy )
       Many consider James Joyce to be the greatest writer ever. I don't see it that way although I acknowledge his wonderous command of the language and consider his work to be essential reading for anyone who considers themselves well educated. The dim-witted pseudo-intellectuals who consider reading authors like Joyce to be a substitute for the study of classical and historical literature, language, and philosophy are dangerously deluded. In fact those without a strong background in classical studies of antiquity can never hope to understand modern writers and philosophers. Joyce and other modern writers such as Nietzsche and Gibbon assumed a strong classical education in their readers, those without a thorough knowledge of the literature, history, and philosophies of Greece and Rome can only misinterpet the readings of these kinds of authors.











October 30 , 2008