Revisiting Dublin
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Frank Budgen, in his 1934 book "James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses" relates this anecdote about Joyce's obsessive attention to his craft:
Budgen's book was out of print even when I begam reading Joyce and I was lucky enough to stumble across a US reprint of the work from 1964 in a second-hand book store in Singapore in the mid 1990s. I have been reading it again in conjucntion, not with Ulysess, but with Dubliners. The quotation above reflects the almost perfect prose of this much earlier work, too.
Two stories stand out in Dubliners. The Dead, obviously, because of its scale and its well-earned reputation as one of the best short stories ever written, but also After the Race, which in its surface subject matter of wealthy young man led astray for a night of drunken gambling seems much more Scott Fitzgerald than Joyce.
All the stories reward periodic re-reading and they seem as beautiful and inspiring now as they did when I first bought my Penguin Modern Classics version with its cover painting by Jack B. Yeats back in 1975. Joyce's prose was never about something so simple as finding the mot juste. Each word, each phrase, each sentence is an essential part of the whole structure. Yet this never appears to be some dry literary game of architecture: Joyce's choices (to make a poor pun on a book title by Hugh Kenner) always breathe life into the text rather than render it 'clever' or showy.
It is dangerous to read Joyce, however: it makes much current writing seem very pale and lifeless by comparison. His brilliance has forced most modern writers to return to the plot as the prime driver of any fiction, more's the pity.
I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?And Joyce, as so often, did indeed have it.
"I have been working on it all day," said Joyce.
"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.
"Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling.I thought of Flaubert.
"You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
"No," said Joyce."I have the words already.What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."
Budgen's book was out of print even when I begam reading Joyce and I was lucky enough to stumble across a US reprint of the work from 1964 in a second-hand book store in Singapore in the mid 1990s. I have been reading it again in conjucntion, not with Ulysess, but with Dubliners. The quotation above reflects the almost perfect prose of this much earlier work, too.
Two stories stand out in Dubliners. The Dead, obviously, because of its scale and its well-earned reputation as one of the best short stories ever written, but also After the Race, which in its surface subject matter of wealthy young man led astray for a night of drunken gambling seems much more Scott Fitzgerald than Joyce.
All the stories reward periodic re-reading and they seem as beautiful and inspiring now as they did when I first bought my Penguin Modern Classics version with its cover painting by Jack B. Yeats back in 1975. Joyce's prose was never about something so simple as finding the mot juste. Each word, each phrase, each sentence is an essential part of the whole structure. Yet this never appears to be some dry literary game of architecture: Joyce's choices (to make a poor pun on a book title by Hugh Kenner) always breathe life into the text rather than render it 'clever' or showy.
It is dangerous to read Joyce, however: it makes much current writing seem very pale and lifeless by comparison. His brilliance has forced most modern writers to return to the plot as the prime driver of any fiction, more's the pity.
