Today is the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. June 16, 1904 is the day on which James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses is set. On popular and academic surveys, Ulysses is generally regarded as the best novel of the 20th century.
Dublin, where the novel is set, is planning a huge festival to mark the centenary of Bloomsday. The organizer of the festival told the BBC that, "I have to confesses that I've never waded my way through Ulysses, but I'm hugely proud that we have produced a writer who's esteemed internationally."
I was really atonished by that comment. That the organizer of a huge festival in honor of a book has never actually read the book in question. But that doesn't stop her from being proud.
It made me wonder why some things are held in such high esteem almost on reflex. Finnegan's Wake is another book, also by Joyce, that enjoys a fantastic reputation even though most people who praise it will admit to not having read or finished it.
I don't mean to pick on Joyce. I very much enjoyed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I've never read Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake so I can't comment on them. Which is exactly my point. How can people who've never read these books laud them as some of the best stuff the 20th century had to offer?
Or maybe the reputations of such books are so high precisely because so few people have actually read them. In some circles, "accessibility" is seen as a crime, as nothing more than lowest-common-denominator pulp fiction. If a book is too dense for most people, then it's almost proof of its worthy literary qualities.
The Peanuts comic strip is another example of an artistic work that's fantastically popular on reputation and I can't understand why. Sure, the cartoons are cute and the characters endearing, but whenever I read a Peanuts' strip, I rarely laugh or am impressed. Their holiday specials were pretty good. But I'm sorry, a Peanuts' strip can't hold a candle to Calvin & Hobbes, which is the most brilliant cartoon ever written. Even a current cartoon like Frazz makes more cogent observations about childhood.
Irishman Roddy Doyle said that Joyce "could have done with a good editor". Doyle is the author of several excellent books; I say his books are excellent not based on some mythical reputation but because I read a few and found them compelling. I find Peanuts fairly pedestrian. And it's almost sacriligeous to say that. Peanuts is an American institution and no one can do anything but sing its unbridled praise. Ulysses isn't the best book of the 20th century just because a few academics, who may or may not have read it, said so.
Reputations should be earned, not given automatically on someone else's say so.
3 comments:
Organizing a festival. Hasn't read the book. I'm stunned.
Interesting counterpoint: There was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a group of scholars that are starting a journal dedicated to the study of Tolkien's work. They lamented that no matter how serious their scholarship the academic community looks down on them as a bunch of freaks dressed up as orcs and hobbits.
Bobo, I'm not much into fantasy, but the non-human characters can make for a nice metaphor on the human condition for whatever point the author's trying to get across. Sometimes the non-human metaphor works even better because it puts a little dispassionate distance.
I agree. I tried to read Finnegans Wake but gave up in despair. Ulysses also defeated me, although it might have been the occasion I chose - a family holiday to Florida when I was 16, it isn't exactly a "beach novel"! - but Portrait.. is much better and much more readable.
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