Structures--Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with Ulysses. Joyce Carol Oates, in her book The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another. Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from Fathom.
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
Steven,
ReplyDelete_The Hunger Games_ is the Feb book selection for the SF Group I belong to. I just finished it yesterday. It's a page-turner and very action-oriented. However, I didn't find the philosophy in the book that one of the blurbs promised me. Perhaps it was too subtle for me to pick up on.
The Theroux book sounds interesting. I hadn't heard of it or of the author. Thanks for the link.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Philosophy in a YA? I wonder what they were thinking. I see a worldview and a certain way in which there is a kind of thinking that would be comfortable for the YA world (you and me against the mean bad world that grown-ups have made). And there's more and more of this evolving.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call it a worldview--more likely just typical adolescent thinking that many never grow out of.