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Cobweb Heart posted:Naked Lunch. You can begin reading it at any point and have pretty much the same amount of understanding as someone who began reading at the beginning. The story is that while the book may or may not have been written in somewhat linear fashion, it ended up as a pile of papers strewn randomly around Burroughs floor and just sort of thrown together at random or "best guess" by Ginsberg and Kerouac.
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Jan 2, 2016 02:10
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at the date posted:Nah. FW is obtuse for other reasons, and Ulysses has no action or alien concepts to throw you in the middle of. It's just some guys waking up and having breakfast in regular old Sandycove, Ireland, and then doing stuff the rest of the day, with some flashbacks thrown in. It might make you feel less dumb to have read a shitload of Aristotle and Aquinas beforehand, but you don't need a lot of background information on characters and events unless you're completely unfamiliar with modern Irish history and Catholicism. I grew up in a somewhat secular Jewish household in California so when I first started reading Joyce (I started with Portrait) it really did feel like a lot of alien concepts, as I had not read anything quite so steeped in Catholicism before. But by the time I got to Ulysses I had done more research. That said there is an argument to be made that Ulysses throws you in "the middle" simply because the earlier life of Stephen had already been covered in Portrait. I don't think Joyce is intentionally throwing anyone in "the deep end" so much as he was assuming his readers knew what it was like to live in Dublin in the early 20th century and used a lot of shorthand and references that they would immediately get, but which is more confusing or alien to modern, non-Irish readers. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:23
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Ulysses isn't impenetrable, but if you aren't an Irish Catholic from the early 1900s - or someone who happens to do a lot of research on that place and period I guess - then I would say there is a hell of a lot of the book you are likely to miss without reading a guide of some sort, or reading it in a class.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:31
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